Short answers, pulled from the story.
Recife was founded in 1537, first documented in a royal Charter Act of the 12th of March 1537. The settlement grew from fishing shacks and warehouses at the delta of the Capibaribe and Beberibe Rivers during the Portuguese colonisation of northeastern Brazil, in the captaincy administered by Captain General Duarte Coelho.
Recife is built across three islands, named Recife, Santo Antonio, and Boa Vista, connected by more than fifty bridges over the Beberibe and Capibaribe Rivers and their tributaries. The combination of islands, rivers, and bridges creates a maritime atmosphere that earned the city its nickname.
The Kahal Zur Israel Synagogue, located in the Recife Antigo neighbourhood, is the oldest synagogue in the Americas, dating to 1646. It was founded by Sephardic Jews who came with the Dutch West India Company during the New Holland colonial period. When the Portuguese reconquered the region in 1654, many of these Jews moved north and helped establish the congregation that became the Portuguese and Spanish Synagogue in New York City's Upper West Side.
A sandbank extending roughly one thousand metres from shore and the beach itself form a deep channel, between five and eight metres deep, that attracts prey species and keeps sharks close to the coast. From the 28th of June 1992 through 2021, authorities recorded 64 attacks along a 20 km stretch of coastline, 26 of them fatal. Surfing has been banned on the urban beaches since 1995, and researchers have linked the increased shark presence to the ecological disruption caused by construction of the Suape port.
Porto Digital is an information technology district in Recife, founded in July 2000. It hosts more than 90 companies and around 3,000 high-tech jobs, generating approximately 10 billion Brazilian Reais a year and exporting technology to the United States, India, Japan, and China. Multinationals including IBM, Microsoft, Samsung, and Dell have operations there, drawing on talent from the Federal University of Pernambuco's computer-science department.
Galo da Madrugada is the largest carnival event in Brazil, held each Carnival Saturday in downtown Recife. More than two and a half million people attend the event annually. It marks the official opening of the Brazilian Carnival and takes place in the area known as Old Recife.