Barão Geraldo
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Barão Geraldo is a district of the municipality of Campinas, in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. It is named after Barão Geraldo de Rezende, a baron of the Empire of Brazil who owned a large farm in the region, in the 19th century.
Barão Geraldo is distant approximately 15 km from Campinas' downtown and it is mainly connected to it via the Rodovia Campinas-Paulínia highway. Barão Geraldo is famous for hosting the main campus of the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), one of the best universities in the country. The university campus is surrounded by typical suburban communities, the Cidade Universitária Campineira, so named because many professors and a large number of students reside there; as well as by beautiful gated condominiums, such as Rio das Pedras, and many old farms, such as Pau D'Alho, Santa Eudóxia, Rio das Pedras and Santa Genebra. The University itself and the surrounding residential communities were built on a former coffee and sugarcane plantation.
Near UNICAMP, the district hosts also a large high-tech industrial zone (with several companies, such as Nortel), two research and development institutions, the Centro de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento (CPqD), in telecommunications and information technology, and the Laboratório Nacional de Luz Síncrotron, a national research laboratory with the only light synchrotron installation in South America. It is thus considered the main part of the so-called Brazilian Silicon Valley.
The district has a sub-mayor and has about 45,000 inhabitants living in 70 sections. It has the highest per capita income in the county.
