Before there was a railhead there was a crossing. On January 1, 1907, Francisco Whitaker founded Porto Tibiriçá on the São Paulo bank of the Paraná, and the settlement existed for one reason — to move cattle. Herds were driven along the Estrada Boiadeira, more than a hundred kilometers from the advancing Sorocabana tracks, then swum or ferried across the river toward Mato Grosso. It was rough, seasonal, muddy work, and it made the place a hinge between two economies rather than a destination in itself. Then the railway caught up. When the Porto Presidente Epitácio station was inaugurated in 1922, the cattle drive shortened to nothing and the port became the point where rail freight met river freight. The town that grew around it was named for Epitácio Pessoa, the Paraíba jurist who was elected President of Brazil in 1919 while he was in Paris leading the Brazilian delegation to the Versailles peace conference. São Paulo made the settlement a municipality by state law in 1948.

The Engenheiro Sérgio Motta dam — everyone calls it Porto Primavera — began construction in 1980 and started operating in 1999. Its reservoir flooded roughly 220,000 hectares and widened the bed of the Paraná by something close to ninefold. Presidente Epitácio's river port, the reason the town existed, shut down that same year, drowned along with the sandbars and channels its pilots had memorized. The change was not gentle. Islands went under. Riverside families who fished and farmed the floodplain were moved. Archaeological sites recording much older occupations of the upper Paraná disappeared beneath the water, along with stretches of native Atlantic Forest and cerrado. What remained was a far broader, far calmer body of water than anyone in town had grown up with — a lake pretending to be a river.

The town had already claimed its second identity before the flood arrived. In July 1990 Presidente Epitácio was designated an estância turística, a state-recognized resort municipality, and gave itself the nickname Joia Ribeirinha — the riverside jewel. The wide water made the title stick. The Balneário Municipal Figueiral offers freshwater beaches on the Paraná, with sports courts, kiosks, and fishing, and the surrounding stretch of river has become a circuit of boat trips, island day-outings, and sport fishing. Roughly 44,000 people live across the municipality's 1,260 square kilometers, at an elevation of 310 meters, and a good share of them now work in hotels, pousadas, and the small economy of a place people drive to on weekends. The sunsets over the Paraná are the local currency — flat horizon, enormous sky, no far bank in sight.

Presidente Epitácio also holds pieces of one of Brazil's most fought-over conservation landscapes. The municipality contains the 937-hectare Lagoa São Paulo Reserve, part of the 246,800-hectare Great Pontal Reserve created in 1942, and about eleven percent of the Mico Leão Preto Ecological Station, a 6,677-hectare unit established in 2002. That last name belongs to the black lion tamarin, a small dark primate found nowhere on Earth but the western interior of São Paulo state, and one that came so close to disappearing that it was presumed extinct for decades before being rediscovered. The Pontal do Paranapanema is what is left of forest that was cut for coffee, cattle, and settlement across the twentieth century. The remnants are small, scattered, and contested — but they are the reason the tamarin still has anywhere to be.

There is a particular character to towns built as terminals. They are made to receive things and forward them somewhere else, and when the forwarding stops — when the last train leaves and the port closes in the same year — the usual outcome is a slow emptying out. Presidente Epitácio did something else. It turned toward the water that had ruined its port and sold the view. Whether that counts as reinvention or as making the best of a decision made 500 kilometers away in a planning office is a question locals can argue either way. Both answers are true.