The settlement's founding traces to a land grant and a donation. In the seventeenth century, as Portuguese colonists navigated the Guamá River looking for extractable wealth, the captaincy granted sesmarias, or land allotments, to the Carmelite friars of the Convento do Carmo in Belém. The friars established the Pernambuco estate in the region. Then in 1758, a landowner named Agostinho Domingos da Siqueira donated land for a chapel. Bishop Miguel de Bulhões, acting in the same year, created the parish of São Miguel, also known as São Miguel da Cachoeira, after the cachoeira or waterfall on the river where the chapel stood. The vicar arrived. The Mother Church went up. Houses spread around the church. For the rest of the colonial period, São Miguel remained a simple parish under the ecclesiastical structure. The political separation came slowly. In 1833 the territory fell under the municipality of Ourém, next door to the east. In 1872 the parish became a village, and on October 31, 1873, provincial law number 2,663 created the municipality of São Miguel do Guamá, the parish promoted to township in a single act of legislation.

The Guamá River cuts through the municipality from west to east, and São Miguel do Guamá's seat sits on its left bank. The river has always been the reason. When the Portuguese settled this stretch in the seventeenth century, the river was the highway; nothing else moved through this country fast enough to matter. The municipality today covers 1,341 square kilometers at an elevation of just 10 meters above sea level, nearly flat floodplain cut by watercourses. It borders Santa Maria do Pará and Bonito to the north, Ourém to the east, São Domingos do Capim and Irituia to the south, and Inhangapi and Castanhal to the west. Estimated population in 2020: 59,632. Three smaller districts belong to the municipality: Caju, Urucuri, and Urucuriteua. The town itself, the sede, is identified simply by the municipal name. Highways now matter as much as the river, and the BR-316 runs through town connecting Belém to São Luís, a corridor of buses and trucks moving through at all hours.

São Miguel do Guamá's modern identity is ceramic. The combination of thick riverine clay deposits, abundant firewood for kilns, and highway access to Belém turned the town into the single largest brick-and-tile manufacturing center in Pará state. An average of 50 factories operate, ranging from small family yards to the industrial plants of the largest firms: São Cerâmica Barreira, Barbosa, Cemil, and Kamiranga. Production runs to roughly 30 million bricks per month, 8 million roof tiles per month, and the finished products leave on trucks bound for every region of Brazil. The industry has its costs. The kilns consume enormous amounts of wood and have contributed to regional deforestation; environmental agencies have pushed producers toward reforestation plantations of eucalyptus and toward cleaner fuel sources. But the work provides employment that is hard to find elsewhere in rural Pará, and the bricks keep moving. A worker at a São Cerâmica Barreira yard shapes ten thousand bricks a day, the clay leaving his hands in neat stacks before the kilns take them.

São Miguel do Guamá is not a tourist destination and does not pretend to be. It has one public university campus, UEPA, the State University of Pará, plus various smaller institutions. The town's economy is practical and regional: bricks and tiles moving out, goods and services moving in along the highway, a middle-sized place that holds its own between Belém's orbit and the smaller towns further east. The Igreja Matriz, the Mother Church that grew from that 1758 chapel donation, still anchors the historic center. The river still cuts through. The kilns still fire. If you drive through São Miguel on the BR-316 heading east from Belém, you pass brickyards and tile factories for kilometers, the stacks of finished product visible from the road, the dust of clay and fired earth settling on everything. The town's nickname for its residents is Guamaense, from the river that made them. The parish named for the archangel has, for two and a half centuries, been a working place on a working river. It still is.