A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
pampa
The pampa is the vast fertile grassland plain of Argentina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil, running some 300,000 square miles with almost no relief and almost no trees. Deep soil, a temperate climate, and grass to the horizon made it one of the great cattle and grain regions of the world, and the gaucho culture that grew on it is the local equivalent of the North American cowboy.
Etymology
The word is Quechua for a flat open plain and came into Spanish from the Andes, then into English. It is one of a family of Indigenous American grassland words English has collected, alongside llano from Spanish, savanna from Taíno, prairie from French, and campo and cerrado from Portuguese.
Notes
The pampero, a violent cold wind that sweeps across the pampa from the southwest and drops the temperature sharply, is named from it. Before European cattle, the grassland carried its own grazers, and the region has produced some of the richest fossil beds of large mammals anywhere, which Darwin worked on during the Beagle voyage.