Before the fans and before the name, there was a village on the banks of the São Domingos river called Cerradinho - little cerrado, after the scrubby savannah vegetation that once covered this country. The land had belonged to Araraquara, and the same vast holdings would eventually spin off Monte Alto, Jaboticabal, and São José do Rio Preto. Who exactly founded the settlement is genuinely unsettled. One account credits the Figueiredo family, migrants from Minas Gerais. Another names Antônio Maximiano Rodrigues, also a mineiro, who bought land here at the close of the nineteenth century and later donated part of it to the parish of São Domingos. The saint stuck: Saint Dominic remains the city's patron. On December 16, 1909, the village was elevated to a district under the name Vila Adolpho, and on April 14, 1918, Catanduva became a municipality in its own right.

The fan cluster is the kind of industrial concentration economists write papers about. Companies including Loren Sid, Arge, Tron, and Venti-Delta operate here, and Loren Sid alone has accounted for roughly a quarter of Brazilian output. Almost every component is made locally - steel plate and copper wire trucked in from the state capital, motors and cages and housings fabricated in Catanduva itself. The notable exception is the wooden blade, which comes down from the north of the country. The rhythm of the whole industry is seasonal in a way few manufacturing towns experience so directly: when a heat wave settles over Brazil, the lines here run hot too, and a bad summer for everyone else is a good quarter for Catanduva.

Drive any direction out of town and the fields close in - sugarcane to the horizon, in a region that ranks among the largest cane zones in São Paulo state. It was here that the entrepreneur José Fernandes bought a sugar and alcohol mill that grew into the Cerradinho group, named for the old village. The timing was fortunate twice over. Brazil's Proálcool programme in the mid-1970s pushed ethanol into the national fuel supply, and the arrival of flex-fuel cars from 2003 onward gave the industry a second surge. Cane still shapes the year here: the harvest season, the smell of the mills, the truck convoys hauling stalks along the highways at night.

Catanduva is the second largest city in the northern part of São Paulo state, behind only São José do Rio Preto, and it anchors a microregion of some 221,000 people. It is also emphatically a city rather than a farm town - 99.2 percent of its population lives in the urban area, at a density of about 398 people per square kilometre. Commerce and services generate 70.5 percent of local GDP, industry the remaining 28.5. The climate is tropical with a dry winter, Köppen Aw, averaging 25.33 degrees Celsius across the year, with three genuinely dry months and summers that arrive wet and heavy. The São Domingos river still runs through, joined by a scatter of streams with working names: Barro Preto, Fundo, Dos Coqueiros, Jacu.

For a mid-sized interior city, Catanduva has exported an unusual amount of talent. Alex Sandro, the left-back who spent years at Juventus and played for the Brazilian national team, is from here. So is Alan Patrick. Luis Paulo Supi, a chess grandmaster who made international headlines with an online victory over Magnus Carlsen, grew up in the city. Altobeli da Silva runs distance for Brazil; Athos de Oliveira swims for it. At home, football is the business of Grêmio Catanduvense, which took over from a long line of now-defunct clubs and plays at the Estádio Municipal Sílvio Salles - a modest ground, but on match days the loudest place in the fan capital.