Terra indígena Raposa/Serra do Sol (Portuguese for Fox/Sun Hills Indigenous Land) is an indigenous territory in Brazil, intended to be home to the Macuxi people. It is located in the northern half of the Brazilian state of Roraima and is the largest in that country and one of the world's largest, with an area of and a perimeter of about . Location The area includes two major natural landscapes: plains occupied by a type of vegetation similar to that of cerrado and steep mountains covered with thick rainforest. The Pacaraima Mountains in the north of the territory separate Brazil from Venezuela and Guyana. The territory contains the Monte Roraima National Park, created in 1989. Population Raposa Serra do Sol indigenous territory is home to about 20,000 people, most of them Macuxi. Other peoples represented there are the Wapixanas, Ingaricós, Taurepangs and Patamonas, as well as non-indigenous farmers. The inhabitants of the reserve vary wildly in language and degree of cultural contact with the mainstream Brazilian culture. The Macuxis have a good degree of contact with the local non-indigenous society, while others are still outside its reach. Most of the indigenous people in the reserve do not speak Portuguese. Most of the contact the indigenous peoples have had with the mainstream society has been through FUNAI researchers, missionaries, military men, gold miners and farmers, who grow rice in the damp plains. The presence of non-indigenous inhabitants in the reserve is not recent, but has seen a boom recently, since the reserve was proposed, because the Brazilian government usually refunds bona fide settlers for the land they forsake. History The creation of Raposa/Serra do Sol has been the subject of sharp controversy ever since it was first proposed in 1993, for a series of reasons including concerns of national security and territorial integrity. After being identified as an Indian homeland by FUNAI, it was mapped during the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration but was only accepted formally by president Luís Inácio Lula da Silva in 2005. In May 2009 the Brazilian Supreme Court ruled that the reserve should be inhabited only by indigenous people, and an operation began to remove the remaining non-indigenous inhabitants. Concerns about the reserve started back in the 1970s, when Brazilian indigenist Orlando Villas-Boas gave a now-famous interview in which he said that the creation of Indian reserves close to border areas was a risk to the integrity of