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Flags in Iguaçu National Park
In 1549, a Spanish explorer, Cabeza de Vaca, found the falls while travelling down the river. Very impressed, he named them "Quedas de Santa Maria". Later the name changed to Quedas del Iguazú; which was derived from the native name of the local Guarani Indians.
Until 1860, it was under the disputed territory between Brazil and Paraguay, but given the latter's defeat in the Paraguayan War, the falls were recognized as part of the Brazilian territory.
In 1910, the colony's status was upgraded to the position of "vila" (town or village), named "Vila Iguazú", and, in 1914, to city. At that time, the city was known as Foz do Iguassú.
Mural The Legend of the Falls commissioned in 2018 to Miguel Hacher
Aerial view of Iguaçu falls
In 1916, Alberto Santos-Dumont visited the region and, impressed with the beauty of the region, suggested more attention of the government to the area and asked for the appropriation of the land where currently is the Parque do Iguaçu (Iguaçu Park). Until 1917, this region had an owner, Jezus Val. The state appropriated the land in the next year, and, in 1939, the Parque Nacional do Iguaçu ("Iguaçu National Park") was created.
The city experienced a big economical boom in the 1960s to the late 1980s, first with the construction of the Friendship Bridge, concluded in 1965, and the Itaipu Dam, in operation since in 1984.
Spelling of the name[edit]
In 1945, an agreement between the Brazilian Academy of Letters and the academy of Lisbon changed the spelling of the city name to Foz do Iguaçu.
On 19 October 2005, a proposal was made to revert the spelling of the city name to Foz do Iguassú. The proposal was approved in a first debate at the Town Hall and then rejected in a second debate, by four votes for and eight against.
The purpose of the adjustment to the city name was to return the spelling to the original form, as at the foundation of the city in 1914. The change occurred due language reforms of 1945, which changed the orthography of Brazilian Portuguese. However, existing proper names were not obliged to change. Another reason for the proposed adjustment back to the original was that 146 of the 198 member countries of the United Nations do not have the "ç" character in their alphabets.
The adjustment would therefore rationalise any search for the city in search engines, since Foz do Iguaçu's is more widely known for the falls, which are known as the Iguassú Falls. The City councillor proponent of the bill, Djalma Pastorello, felt that tourism to the city of Foz do Iguaçu would improve greatly by a clarification of its association with the now-famous Iguassu Falls. However, he estimated that 70% of the city's population were against the name change because the local media anticipated the change and presented it in a distorted way, so that locals were unable to see that the intention was to benefit the population.
The same word is spelled Iguazú in Spanish and Yguasu in Guarani.
Literature[edit]
The region that today is part of Foz do Iguaçu, is described by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca in his diary that narrates the very experience at the beginning of the European colonization in the Americas. In contemporary literature one of the city's neighborhoods appears in a subjective way in the work of the writer Leonid R. Bózio, who reports in the book Tempos Sombrios, from the series Autofagia, local mysticism through the figure of Pombero, a creature from Guarani mythology.
