Barão Geraldo

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

*Barão Geraldo is a district of the municipality of Campinas, in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. It is named after Barão Geraldo de Rezende, a baron of the Empire of Brazil who owned a large farm in the region, in the 19th century^{[citation needed]}.

Barão Geraldo is distant approximately 15 km from Campinas' downtown and it is mainly connected to it via the Rodovia Campinas-Paulínia highway. Barão Geraldo is famous for hosting the main campus of the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). The university campus is surrounded by typical suburban communities, the Cidade Universitária Campineira, so named because many professors and a large number of students reside there; as well as by gated condominiums, such as Rio das Pedras, and many old farms, such as Pau D'Alho, Santa Eudóxia, Rio das Pedras and Santa Genebra. The University itself and the surrounding residential communities were built on a former coffee and sugarcane plantation^{[citation needed]}.

Near UNICAMP, the district hosts also a large high-tech industrial zone (with several companies, such as Nortel), two research and development institutions, the Centro de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento (CPqD), in telecommunications and information technology, and the Laboratório Nacional de Luz Síncrotron. It is considered the main part of the so-called Brazilian Silicon Valley. Barão Geraldo is also a major health care destination in the state, with the large University Clinics Hospital, the Centro Médico de Campinas, the Centro Infantil Domingos A. Boldrini (a children's cancer hospital), and the Centro de Oncologia Campinas (a cancer treatment polyclinic).