The culture of Brazil is primarily Western, but presents a very diverse nature showing that an ethnic and cultural mixing occurred in the colonial period involving mostly Indigenous peoples of the coastal and most accessible riverine areas, Portuguese people and African peoples. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, together with further waves of Portuguese colonization, Italians, Spaniards, Germans, Levantine Arabs, Nipponics, Poles, Helvetians and Ukrainians settled in Brazil, playing an important role in its culture as it started to shape a multicultural and multiethnic society.