Popular belief holds that Brazil is a "blessed country," where hurricanes, severe earthquakes, volcanoes, and other intense natural disasters do not occur. A closer look, however, reveals many examples that contradict these assumptions. Brazil has been living under the impact of severe environmental, cultural, and political disasters for centuries. Paradigmatic examples in recent years were the fire that destroyed the building and most of the collections of the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro in September 2018 and the rupture of a dam associated with mining activities in Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, in January 2019. Taking a longer view, this essay focuses on Brazilian volcanism and earthquakes since the sixteenth century, asking what these subjects can tell us about the histories of disasters and geological sciences, in Brazil and the world. B razil, like other regions of the world, has recently experienced the effects of severe environmental, cultural, and political disasters-catastrophes not necessarily caused by the fury of nature but, instead, by human actions and unbalanced interactions between people and the environment. At this very moment, there is a future environmental disaster hiding in plain sight in Brazil, threatening an old mining region in Minas Gerais. Several disasters have occurred in this southeastern state in the past four years alone, and another is now looming. Although Brazil is not usually considered a country prone to catastrophes, disasters caused by sudden floods and landslides have nevertheless occurred on a regular basis over the years, contributing to thousands of deaths. Despite this fact, public policies designed both to respond to and to prevent these situations remain woefully absent. It is shameful that the situation has come to this point, given Brazil's history with both Earth sciences and disasters. In this essay, we intend to offer some clues as to why this is the case.Historians of science have recently begun to pay greater attention to catastrophes, including them as subjects in their studies of the so-called disaster sciences. Disasters, in turn, have come to be understood as hybrid entities, triggered by both natural and social causes. As the historian