During the period between the Brazilian declaration of independence from Portugal in 1822 and Brazil's abolition of the slave trade in 1850, Rio de Janeiro constituted the most important destination of Portuguese emigrants in the world. In 1841, the preponderance of these immigrants in that city was described by a representative of the Portuguese government in Rio, Ildefonso Leopoldo Bayard:
In the shops in Rio de Janeiro you find that the majority of the clerks are Portuguese, … in the engenhos the Portuguese are the administrators and the slaves' overseers, in the residences they are the servants, and in the maritime work they are the ships' masters, and even the white fishermen.
A number of factors made this city attractive to these migrants. The arrival of the Portuguese court and the opening of the city's port to foreign trade and foreign merchants, created an economic boom in Rio de Janeiro in the early nineteenth century. This growth was also perpetuated by the increasing coffee economy after the 1830s.