Portuguese colonization of the Americas on 22 April, Cabral landed on the coast, in Porto Seguro. Believing the land to be an island, he named it Ilha de Vera Cruz (Island of the True Cross). The previous expedition of Vasco da Gama to India already recorded several signs of land near its western open Atlantic Ocean route, in 1497. It has also been suggested that Duarte Pacheco Pereira may have discovered the coasts of Brazil in 1498, possible its northeast, but the exact area of the expedition and the explored regions remain unclear. On the other hand, some historians have suggested that the Portuguese may
Portuguese name also bear surnames that cannot be used to distinguish them from the older Catholic Portuguese families. Using tree names as surnames was not a common practice among converted or non-converted Portuguese Jews, before or after their expulsion in 1497. These are some most frequent surnames in Portugal: According to a large scale study of names extracted from various social networking websites, the most common surnames in Brazil are: According to the newspaper Público, the most common given names in Portugal, for 105,000 children born in 2008 were: According to the IBGE the most common given names in Brazil in 2010