Before the town, there was the passo - the ford. The old road from the coast wound painfully through Viamão and Santo Antônio da Patrulha on its way north, so drovers cut a straighter line across the open pampas, into countryside still largely empty of settlers. Where the shallow stream let mule trains cross on foot, a cluster of houses gathered beside the road. The name of the ford spread to the river, then to the settlement itself. The land had older inhabitants - the Kaingang people, whom the colonizers called Coroados, who lived by hunting and gathering honey and fruit and growing corn and beans. The municipality was formally emancipated by provincial law in January 1857 and established that August, on a plateau that its territory once spanned across more than a hundred future towns.

The literary title was earned, not gifted. It began in 1981, when the University of Passo Fundo and the city created the Jornada Nacional de Literatura, a biennial gathering of writers and readers that swelled into one of the largest literary events in Latin America - a single edition drew more than 27,000 people. That decades-long commitment was crowned on January 2, 2006, when federal Law 11.264 made Passo Fundo the only Brazilian city named National Capital of Literature by act of Congress. The city wears the title in public. Literature tunnels line the central avenue, a monument called the Tree of Letters rises in a plaza, and four separate squares across town are given over to the written word.

Locals call their home A Terra de Gente Boa - the land of good people - and Passo Fundo wears its gaúcho identity as plainly as any city in Rio Grande do Sul. It is not unusual to see riders walking the streets in full pilcha, the traditional dress of the southern cattle country. That spirit found its anthem through Teixeirinha, the folk singer born in nearby Rolante who adopted Passo Fundo as his own. His 1960 song Gaúcho de Passo Fundo became a hit across Brazil and put the city on the national map; he wrote two more odes to it and, in 1978, starred in a film bearing its name. A city of literature, it turns out, is also a city that loves a good song.

Passo Fundo sits near the 28th parallel south at 690 meters, high enough that winter brings frost, freezing nights, and the occasional snowfall - a rarity in a country most of the world pictures as tropical. With roughly 204,000 people, it is the tenth-largest city in the state and the third-largest medical center in southern Brazil, a regional hub for the farm country of wheat, soybeans, and corn around it. Its roll of native sons and daughters is long and varied: the World Cup-winning football coach Luiz Felipe Scolari, the supermodel Letícia Birkheuer, and the volleyball-playing Endres brothers all come from here. The city even earned a strange cameo in Hollywood, named in M. Night Shyamalan's 2002 thriller Signs as the source of a home video that captured an alien.