Cascavel is a municipality in the state of Paraná in Brazil. It is the fifth most populous city in the state with 332,333 residents, according to IBGE, a government agency. The distance to Curitiba, the state capital, is 491 kilometers by freeway. Relatively new and with a privileged topography, Cascavel's development was planned, which gives it wide streets and well distributed neighborhoods. With an area of 2,100,831 km2, it is considered a strategic hub of Mercosul. The city is on a plateau 781 meters above sea level. It is 504 km west of the state capital of Curitiba and 605 km west of the sea port of Paranaguá, 140 km from the three borders (Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil) at 24° 58' South, 53° 26' West. Toponymy The name of the city means rattlesnake in Portuguese; it arises from a variation of the classical Latin "caccabus", meaning "bubbling water boiling". According to legend, a group of settlers camped one night in the region and they were woken by the sound of a rattle; later they realized they set up the camp next to a rattlesnake. History Cycle of "erva mate" The Caingangue natives inhabited western Paraná, which was occupied by the Spaniards in 1557, when they founded the Ciudad del Real Guayrá, in the current city of Terra Roxa. A new occupation started in 1730 with troops (troperismo in Portuguese), but the settlement of the current city began in the late 1910s by settlers of mixed racial ethnicity (caboclos (people of indigenous and European descent)), and descendants of Slavic immigrants, at the peak of the cycle of erva mate. The village began to form on March 28, 1928, when José Silverio de Oliveira, dubbed "Nho Jeca", bought a glebe from the settler Jose Antonio Elias, in the historical area called Encruzilhada dos Gomes, and which is currently the Cascavel Velho neighborhood. It was at a junction of several trails open by ervateiros (cultivators of erva mate), drovers and military, where de Oliveira set up his warehouse. His entrepreneurial spirit was key to the arrival of new people, who brought ideas and investments. From the 1930s and 1940s, thousands of southern settlers, mostly descendants of Poles, Germans, Italians, Ukrainians and caboclos migrating from coffee regions, began logging, farming and raising pigs in the village, which became a district in 1938. Notably, the locality was already included in military maps from 1924, and