Dense rainforest and blistering heat make most of the Amazon basin incompatible with large-scale human settlement. Perhaps nowhere is this more true than Roraima, so remote that until the late 19th century European colonists and Brazilian pioneers left it almost entirely to indigenous tribes. Even today, there is only a single settlement of note: Boa Vista. Being situated in the driest portion of the whole Amazon basin, where the rainforest thins into savannah, it could not develop the rubber industry that defines the rest of Northern Brazil, but is well-placed for soybean farming and cattle rearing that feed the citizens of Amazonas and Pará. Reliant on Venezuela for electricity and completely inaccessible except by river boat, it would take extensive new infrastructure projects for Boa Vista to be anything besides a backwater.