Towns in this part of Brazil usually begin with a chapel, and Jaboticabal is no exception - but the founding gesture here was unusually concrete. In the old church of Our Lady of Carmel, inaugurated in 1828, a man named João Pinto Ferreira handed over his inheritance to the Virgin of Mount Carmel. That donation is what the city dates itself from. The original chapel came down around 1926, once its replacement was nearly finished, and the new temple rose on the site of a private house on Joaquim Batista Square. In 1929 it was raised to cathedral rank as the seat of the newly created Diocese of Jaboticabal. Locals still treat the building as the marco zero, the point from which the city measures itself. Two of its bishops, Dom Antônio Augusto de Assis and Dom José Varani, are buried inside.

Jaboticabal grows more peanuts than any other municipality in Brazil, and it has built an identity on the fact. It is the Capital do Amendoim, and it hosts the Feira Nacional do Amendoim, the national peanut fair, where growers and traders and equipment dealers converge on a crop that most of the country thinks of as a bar snack. The reality is a serious export business: Brazilian peanuts move to Europe and Asia in volume, much of it grown on land that rotates with sugarcane. Many of the farms here have been handed from parent to child across generations, and the knowledge that comes with them - which varieties tolerate which soils, when to lift, how to dry - is as much a local inheritance as João Pinto Ferreira's.

The other thing Jaboticabal is known for is science. The Faculdade de Ciências Agrárias e Veterinárias - the agricultural and veterinary sciences faculty of UNESP, São Paulo State University - occupies a campus here that has become one of the most consequential agricultural research centres in Brazil. Its fruit collections, its work on peanut culture, and CAUNESP, the aquaculture centre based on the campus, feed into an industry that supplies a substantial part of the world's food. It is a slightly surreal juxtaposition. In a town of under eighty thousand people, laboratories are working on problems that will show up years later in yields across an entire continent.

Step outside the city limits and the sugarcane takes over. Jaboticabal sits inside one of the wealthiest agricultural regions in São Paulo state - a zone that generates something like 8.5 percent of the state's gross domestic product - and the mills that process the cane are as much a part of the skyline as the cathedral towers. The municipality covers 707 square kilometres and includes the districts of Córrego Rico and Lusitânia alongside the main town. The population stood at 77,652 in 2020 estimates. It is agribusiness country in the fullest sense: the fields, the processing plants, the university that trains the agronomists, and the trucks that connect all three.

Religion in Jaboticabal maps the change happening across Brazil. The Catholic church still holds the centre - literally, in the case of the cathedral on Joaquim Batista Square, and institutionally as the seat of its own diocese. But the evangelical churches have grown steadily and now form a substantial second presence: the Assemblies of God, the Christian Congregation in Brazil, and a spread of smaller Pentecostal congregations. On a Sunday morning, the sound coming out of the storefront churches on the edge of town competes with the cathedral bells, which is a fair description of religious life in the Brazilian interior generally.