History
Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (or CVRD, as the company was better known prior to 2007) (in English, Sweet River Valley Company) was founded in Itabira, Minas Gerais, as a public company by the Brazilian Federal Government on June 1, 1942. One year later the Vitória a Minas railroad was inaugurated. CVRD, just seven years after its foundation, was already responsible for 80% of Brazilian iron ore exports. In 1966, the company inaugurated in Espirito Santo the Port of Tubarão, which was to become the most important port for CVRD and is still used to export iron ore mined from the Iron Quadrangle in Minas Gerais.
The Carajás Mine, on which Vale still has over 1.5 billion tonnes of iron ore in reserves, started to have Vale as a majority stakeholder in 1970. In 1974, Vale became the world's biggest exporter of iron ore, a title which it still holds today. Then, in 1982, Vale began to diversify itself after it started to produce aluminium in Rio de Janeiro. Throughout its history, CVRD’s activities, once restricted to the Southeast, were expanded to the Northeast, Central-West, and North of Brazil, diversifying its mineral product portfolio and consolidating logistics services.
Vale in 1985 started to explore the Carajás Mine in the state of Pará just after the Carajás railroad was opened and in 1986 Ponta Madeira port terminal, which is still used to export iron ore mined at the Carajás Mines, was inaugurated in the state of Maranhão. This railway is 1,600 mm (5 ft 3 in) gauge.
Read more about this topic: Vale (mining Company)
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“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)