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Rio de Janeiro

Rio de Janeiro is one of the world's great cities by any measure — the natural stage of Guanabara Bay, Christ the Redeemer on Corcovado, and the granite spike of Sugarloaf Mountain combine with the beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema to create a scenographic backdrop for a city of 7 million whose Carnaval sambadrome parade, favela samba schools, and sunset caipirinhas over the Mirante do Leblon have made it the world's most romanticised city since the age of the ocean liner. The state beyond the city is equally rewarding: Petrópolis, the mountain summer capital of the Brazilian Empire, shelters the Crystal Palace and the Imperial Museum in an alpine setting an hour from the city; and Paraty, the UNESCO-listed colonial port town on the Costa Verde, is arguably Brazil's most perfectly preserved colonial townscape, its streets inundated by the tide at highest water. The Atlantic Forest remnants of the Serra dos Órgãos National Park, visible from rooftops across the northern bairros, are among the most biodiverse forest fragments on Earth.

São Paulo

São Paulo is the engine of South America — a city of 22 million people whose restaurant scene rivals New York and Paris and whose club culture in the Vila Madalena and Pinheiros neighbourhoods defines what a nightlife city looks like without sleep. The Avenida Paulista corridor, crowned by MASP — the São Paulo Museum of Art, suspended on red concrete pillars above the avenue — and the surrounding cluster of galleries and cultural centres makes this the best single street for contemporary art in the hemisphere. Beyond the metropolis, the state's Atlantic coast delivers Ubatuba's surf and rainforest beaches, and the interior offers the Vale do Paraíba's colonial history and the Serra da Mantiqueira mountain walks.

Bahia

Bahia is the spiritual and cultural capital of Black Brazil — the state that received more enslaved Africans than any other in the Americas, whose Candomblé religion, capoeira martial art, acarajé street food, and axé music have spread from Salvador across the entire country and outward to the global diaspora. Salvador, Brazil's first colonial capital and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, occupies a hilltop peninsula above the Bay of All Saints where the Pelourinho historical district's coloured colonial facades rise above a bay that still carries the ceremonial canoes used in Candomblé rituals to the sea. The Bahia coastline extends 1,100 kilometres — from the Chapada Diamantina's diamond-mining highland interior with its tabletop mountains and subterranean rivers to the Trancoso resort village and Arraial d'Ajuda beaches whose sophistication has attracted a European-Brazilian clientele since the 1980s.

Amazonas

Amazonas is the largest state in Brazil — a territory of 1.5 million square kilometres of intact rainforest whose rivers, oxbow lakes, and flooded forest harbour the greatest concentration of biodiversity on the surface of the Earth. Manaus, the improbable Amazon metropolis of 2.2 million people, rises from the jungle at the confluence of the Rio Negro and the Solimões, its iron-framed Teatro Amazonas opera house — built in 1896 at the height of the rubber boom — an architectural miracle in a location of absolute geographical improbability. The Meeting of the Waters (Encontro das Águas), where the black Rio Negro and sandy-coloured Amazon flow side by side for 6 kilometres without mixing due to differences in temperature and density, is one of the most singular natural spectacles in the world.

Minas Gerais

Minas Gerais — 'General Mines' — is the historical heart of colonial Brazil, where the 18th-century gold and diamond rush built the extraordinary Baroque cities of the Estrada Real: Ouro Preto, Diamantina, Tiradentes, and Congonhas, whose churches contain the finest Baroque sculpture and painting in the Americas, created by the enslaved and free-coloured artists of the Minas school. Ouro Preto, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is the most complete surviving colonial city in Brazil — its hilltop churches, cobbled streets, and painted adobes rising above a valley that still conceals worked-out gold mines visitors can enter at the Mina do Veloso. Belo Horizonte, the state capital, is one of Brazil's most sophisticated food cities, its Savassi neighbourhood bars and Mercado Central market operating as a 24-hour eating and drinking institution of national renown.

Rio Grande do Sul

Rio Grande do Sul is Brazil's southernmost and most European state — a gaucho country of vineyards, German-style timber houses, and Jesuit mission ruins stretching from the subtropical Serra Gaúcha wine region to the pampas grasslands of the Uruguay border where cattle herders still ride horses through landscapes indistinguishable from rural Argentina. The Serra Gaúcha hill country around Gramado and Canela delivers the most European townscape in South America — baroque Catholic churches alongside half-timbered German-immigrant facades in a landscape of waterfalls and araucária pine forest — while the Aparados da Serra National Park shelters Itaimbezinho Canyon, a 7-kilometre-long gorge with 720-metre walls that is the most dramatic geological formation in southern Brazil. Porto Alegre, the state capital on the Guaíba river-lake, is one of Brazil's most liveable cities — cultured, prosperous, with a bar culture in the Moinhos de Vento neighbourhood that stays loud until morning.

Paraná

Paraná is home to Foz do Iguaçu — the wider Brazilian side of the Iguazu Falls, where 275 separate cataracts spanning nearly 3 kilometres create a curtain of water and spray that remains, by volume and spectacle, the most overwhelming waterfall system on Earth. Curitiba, the state capital, was the first city in the world to implement bus rapid transit in the 1970s, a transport innovation copied by cities from Bogotá to Guangzhou, and its Botanical Garden's Victorian iron greenhouse and Niemeyer-designed arts centre make it one of Brazil's most design-conscious cities. The Serra do Mar escarpment dropping to the Atlantic through one of the last intact Atlantic Forest patches, and the Jesuit ruins accessible from the state's south, round out a state of surprising variety.

Pernambuco

Pernambuco is where Carnaval was born — the frevo music and multi-coloured umbrella dances of Olinda and Recife predate Rio's samba parade by a century, and the city-wide street party through the hills of UNESCO-listed Olinda is one of the most joyful public celebrations on Earth. Recife's historic Recife Antigo district and the Marco Zero plaza combine with the Boa Viagem beach to give the city an unusual depth of urban history for a tropical coastal metropolis. The Fernando de Noronha archipelago, administered by Pernambuco 350 kilometres offshore, offers the best diving in the South Atlantic and one of the world's most strictly regulated marine protected areas.

Santa Catarina

Santa Catarina is the Brazil that surprises — a southern state of blond-haired, German-descended cities whose Oktoberfest in Blumenau is the second largest in the world outside Munich, whose Florianópolis beach culture draws Argentine and São Paulo holidaymakers to 42 beaches on an island-capital connected to the mainland by a single bridge, and whose oyster farms in the Lagoa de Conceição produce the freshest shellfish in South America. The Serra Catarinense highland plateau around São Joaquim offers the only part of Brazil that reliably receives snow in winter, while the vineyards above Urussanga produce the first Santa Catarina wines to achieve national recognition. Balneário Camboriú, with its dense canyon of high-rise towers and the world's longest gondola, has become Brazil's answer to Miami Beach — a monument to vertical resort development so intense it is visible from approaching aircraft.

Ceará

Ceará is Brazil's most dramatically situated northeastern state — its capital Fortaleza is the country's fifth-largest city, a beach metropolis of nightlife and fresh lobster where the Beira-Mar promenade and the Iracema neighbourhood's live music bars operate as a continuous outdoor party from Thursday through Sunday. The state's interior is dominated by the Sertão — the semi-arid hinterland of mandacaru cactus and red-dust roads that generated the Cangaço bandit tradition, the literatura de cordel broadsheet ballad, and the forró music that now fills dance floors across the country. Jericoacoara, a former fishing village at the end of a sand-track road through coastal dunes accessible only by off-road vehicle, has transformed into Brazil's most celebrated kite-surfing and counterculture beach destination without acquiring a single traffic light.

Pará

Pará is the mouth of the Amazon — the state where the world's greatest river system discharges 20 percent of all fresh water entering the Earth's oceans through a delta wider than the territory of Portugal, enclosing an ecosystem of várzea floodplain forests, manatees, and pink river dolphins on a scale that resists comprehension from the ground. Belém, the state capital, is the great river city of the Amazon — its Ver-o-Peso market, the largest open-air market in Latin America, has sold river fish, exotic herbs, medicinal barks, and Amazonian ceramics in a covered waterfront complex operating continuously since 1688. The Marajó Island, accessible by ferry from Belém, is the world's largest river island — larger than Switzerland — a landscape of water buffalo farms, Marajó pottery traditions, and river channels where boto (pink dolphins) surface within arm's reach of passing boats.

Distrito Federal

The Distrito Federal is Brasília — a city that exists because President Juscelino Kubitschek promised the new capital would be built within his term of office (1956–61) and delivered the entire thing from jungle clearing to presidential inauguration in 1,000 days, creating the most ambitious planned capital city since Washington DC. Oscar Niemeyer's modernist buildings — the National Congress with its twin towers and paired domes, the Presidential Palace on the lake, the Foreign Ministry reflected in its artificial pool — constitute the greatest single collection of modernist civic architecture anywhere in the world, all within walking distance on the planned Monumental Axis. The city's UNESCO World Heritage designation (1987), 3 million residents, and status as Brazil's most affluent city per capita tell the story of a capital that succeeded beyond almost everyone's expectations.

Goiás

Goiás is Brazil's central highland state, where the vast cerrado savanna — a UNESCO biodiversity hotspot of twisted trees, crystalline rivers, and luminous waterfalls — shelters the kind of undiscovered Brazil that adventurous travellers arrive for and spend years describing to friends. The Chapada dos Veadeiros National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, offers canyon and waterfall hiking above plateaus of quartz-veined rock where the sunlight generates a luminosity said to be visible from space. The colonial town of Pirenópolis, its baroque churches and craft markets set in a valley of mango trees, provides the most accessible introduction to the gold-rush history that built central Brazil before Brasília was imagined.

Mato Grosso do Sul

Mato Grosso do Sul is Brazil's gateway to the Pantanal — the world's largest tropical wetland, covering 150,000 square kilometres of seasonal floodplain across Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay, whose density of wildlife during the dry season makes it the best place on Earth to see jaguars in the wild from a river boat. Bonito, in the state's south, is Brazil's eco-tourism showcase: crystal-clear rivers fed by limestone springs allow snorkelling through schools of pacu, dourado, and painted piraputanga alongside otters in conditions of natural aquarium clarity unique to this geological formation. Campo Grande, the state capital, is a modern, prosperous city whose Japanese-Brazilian immigrant community has created the most surprising concentration of Japanese restaurants outside of São Paulo.

Mato Grosso

Mato Grosso straddles two of South America's great biomes — the Amazon in the north and the Pantanal in the south — in a state whose Chapada dos Guimarães plateau, rising 600 metres above the surrounding plains east of Cuiabá, offers cerrado canyon hiking and the viewpoint described as the 'belly button of South America.' The Cristalino Jungle Lodge in the state's northern Alta Floresta region is considered one of the world's premier birding destinations — a private reserve contiguous with Cristalino State Park where over 600 bird species have been recorded in intact gallery and terra firme Amazon forest. The northern Pantanal around Poconé provides some of the most accessible jaguar-watching in Brazil, its transpantaneira road running through fazendas converted into wildlife lodges where caiman, giant anteater, and capybara are guaranteed daily sightings.

Rio Grande do Norte

Rio Grande do Norte is Brazil's northeastern state most defined by wind — the constant trade winds that have turned Natal and the Genipabu dune landscape north of the city into the continent's premier buggy-riding and kite-surfing destination, and that fill the offshore wind farms now generating a significant share of the state's electricity from what was previously just weather. The Genipabu Ecological Protection Area, a landscape of towering red-and-gold dunes immediately north of Natal, has been offering buggy and dromedary tours since the 1980s — a Brazilian attraction of such particular absurdity (camels on the equatorial coast) that it has become simultaneously iconic and self-aware. Natal's Forte dos Reis Magos, a 16th-century star-shaped Portuguese fortress on a promontory at the city mouth, is the most intact early colonial military construction in Brazil.

Alagoas

Alagoas is one of Brazil's smallest but most scenically gifted states — its coastline between Maceió and the São Francisco River mouth includes Maragogi, whose offshore natural pools (galés) of crystalline warm water in a marine protected area are ranked among the most beautiful snorkelling sites in the country. Maceió, the state capital, sits on a coastal lagoon with white-sand beaches, and its Pontal da Barra neighbourhood produces the finest renda de bilro handmade lace in the northeast in a tradition going back to Portuguese colonial times. The São Francisco River mouth at Penedo, where the great northeastern river finally reaches the sea through mangrove channels, is one of the most atmospheric destinations in the entire northeast.

Sergipe

Sergipe is Brazil's smallest state and one of its most underestimated — a northeastern pocket of sugarcane coast, colonial-era engenhos (sugar mills), and riverine villages where the Festa de São João generates the most concentrated folk culture spectacle in Brazil per square kilometre. Aracaju, the state capital, is an agreeable beach city whose Atalaia beach and Orla neighbourhood promenade offer a genuine northeastern seafront culture without the tourist infrastructure that has transformed Fortaleza and Natal. The São Francisco River town of Penedo on the Alagoas border, with its 18th-century Franciscan churches rising from the riverbank above the mangroves, is the single most rewarding historical site in the entire lower São Francisco valley.

Paraíba

Paraíba holds the geographic distinction of containing the easternmost point of the Americas — the Ponta do Seixas headland outside João Pessoa, where the first rays of sunrise in the Western Hemisphere break over a lighthouse above red-cliffed Atlantic beaches. João Pessoa is one of Brazil's most walkable and agreeable medium-sized cities, its colonial-era churches of the Cidade Alta combining with the Tambaú beachfront's relaxed seafront culture in a city that larger neighbours have consistently overlooked to visitors' benefit. The state's Boqueirão reservoir area preserves the folk music, artisan pottery, and Midsummer Festival (São João) traditions of the semi-arid Sertão that resisted modernisation far longer than the coastal cities.

Espírito Santo

Espírito Santo is the quiet achiever of southeastern Brazil — a state of Germanic immigrant hill towns, historic tropical forests, and a coastline of relative serenity compared to its neighbours, whose state capital Vitória occupies an island in a bay so sheltered and reef-protected that it simultaneously functions as a commercial port and a swimming beach. The Guarapari beaches to the south, known for their monazite sand, attract health-conscious Brazilian holiday-makers to one of the coast's least-developed stretches. The historic towns of Domingos Martins and Santa Leopoldina in the state's interior hill country are the most complete surviving examples of German and Swiss immigrant vernacular architecture in Brazil, their half-timbered facades transplanting a European building tradition into tropical forest.

Rio de Janeiro

The city of Carnival, Copacabana, and Christ the Redeemer needs no introduction but rewards every visit with details the photographs never capture — the way the afternoon light falls on the boulders of Sugarloaf, the sound of a pagode circle at a corner bar in Lapa at midnight, the view from a favela rooftop over the Guanabara Bay that makes you understand why the Portuguese named this 'River of January' and stopped sailing further. The historic Santa Teresa neighbourhood, the Selarón steps, the Museum of Tomorrow on the renovated Porto Maravilha waterfront, and the Tijuca Forest — the world's largest urban rainforest — ensure the city rewards days of walking as much as beach-lying. Beyond Carnival and the beaches, Rio's calendar of samba school rehearsals, forró nights, and outdoor cinema in Aterro do Flamengo park makes it a city of perpetual festivity.

São Paulo

São Paulo is the city that never sleeps in the most literal possible sense — a megalopolis of 22 million whose Liberdade Japanese quarter, the Vila Madalena street art alleyways, and the MASP museum suspended over Avenida Paulista operate on a social schedule that begins at 10 p.m. and closes the following afternoon. The São Paulo Museum of Art's collection includes works by Raphael, Rembrandt, Renoir, and Van Gogh in a building designed to be transparent from the street below — a deliberate statement about public access to culture that no other museum in South America has attempted. The city's restaurant scene is the most diverse in the hemisphere, where Libanese, Japanese, Italian, and nordestino Brazilian cuisines evolved in parallel immigrant communities and are available at any hour of the day.

Salvador

Salvador is the capital of Afro-Brazilian culture — a city of 3 million built on a promontory above the Bay of All Saints where the Pelourinho historical district's candy-coloured colonial facades rise above streets that echo with atabaque drums, capoeira sparring, and the smell of acarajé (black-eyed pea fritters filled with dried shrimp and vatapá) frying on every corner. The Carnaval in Salvador is by some measures larger than Rio's — not a seated parade but a city-wide procession behind trios elétricos (enormous sound-system trucks) where the entire street dances for seven days straight. The Bonfim church on the Itapagipe peninsula, whose ribbons tied to the railings by the faithful have become a global symbol of Brazilian popular religion, looks out over the bay that received more slave ships than any other harbour in the Americas.

Manaus

Manaus rises from the Amazon jungle like an improbable dream — a city of 2.2 million built at the confluence of the Rio Negro and the Solimões at a point where the nearest road connection to the rest of Brazil is 4,000 kilometres of river or 2 hours by plane. The Teatro Amazonas opera house, built in 1896 with iron framework shipped from England, a dome of tiles from Alsace, and marble from Carrara during the rubber boom, is a monument to the extraordinary wealth — and hubris — that the Amazon forest once extracted. The Meeting of the Waters excursion, where the black Rio Negro and sandy-coloured Amazon flow in parallel for 6 kilometres before finally mixing, is one of the most astonishing natural phenomena visible from a tourist boat anywhere in the world.

Ouro Preto

Ouro Preto is the most complete surviving colonial city in Brazil — a UNESCO World Heritage Site of cobbled streets, baroque churches, and painted adobes on a hillside in Minas Gerais that looks essentially unchanged from the 18th century when it was the most prosperous city in the entire Portuguese empire, its gold mines producing a third of the world's gold supply. The city's 13 baroque churches each contain masterpieces of colonial sculpture and painting — most significantly the works of Aleijadinho (Antônio Francisco Lisboa), the disabled sculptor whose carved soapstone prophets at the Congonhas sanctuary are considered the finest sculpture ever produced in the Americas. The Mina do Veloso underground tour, the School of Mines' extraordinary mineral museum, and the city's dramatic hillside topography make Ouro Preto as rewarding to explore on foot as any city of its size in the world.

Florianópolis

Florianópolis occupies an island connected to the Santa Catarina mainland by a single bridge, its 42 beaches ranging from the surfing breaks of Joaquina and Praia do Rosa to the calm lagoon shores of Lagoa da Conceição where kitesurfers skim above waters so still they reflect the surrounding forest hills. The city is Brazil's technology capital — a disproportionate number of Brazilian start-ups have their headquarters or key offices on the island, attracted by the quality of life and the Federal University — and its Itacorubi and Centro neighbourhoods mix beach-resort ease with genuine creative-economy energy. The island's Ribeirão da Ilha neighbourhood, whose 18th-century Azorean fishing village architecture and oyster farms on the southern tip have changed remarkably little, provides the most authentic counterweight to the modern beach resort on the island's north.

Fortaleza

Fortaleza is Brazil's northeastern beach capital — the fifth-largest city in the country, whose 25 kilometres of urban beach include the famous Beira-Mar promenade where stalls selling agua de coco (coconut water), tapioca, and freshly caught lobster operate from dawn to midnight seven days a week alongside a nightlife that operates on a scale and duration that cities three times the size might envy. The city is the gateway to Jericoacoara — Brazil's most celebrated counterculture beach destination, accessible only by 4×4 through coastal dunes — and to the Canoa Quebrada pink cliffs and Morro Branco natural labyrinths to the east. Fortaleza's Mercado Central, a five-storey handicraft market of hammocks, cachaca, lace, and Cangaço bandit hats, is one of the most atmospheric shopping experiences in the entire northeast.

Brasília

Brasília is the world's greatest museum of modernist architecture in a city where you can live inside it — Oscar Niemeyer's National Congress (twin towers plus paired domes), the Planalto Presidential Palace, the Supreme Court, and the Foreign Ministry are not exhibition pieces but the daily working offices of a continental government, set within Lúcio Costa's pilot plan for a city shaped like a bird or an airplane depending on which aerial photograph you believe. The UNESCO World Heritage designation was awarded in 1987 — only 27 years after the city's inauguration — the fastest any city has ever achieved the status — because the urban design is that complete, that coherent, and that unlike anything built before or since. The city's Pontão do Lago Sul outdoor restaurant and bar complex on the lakefront, the Brasília National Park, and the Dom Bosco sanctuary with its floor-to-ceiling blue stained glass above the lake add a human-scale warmth to an otherwise utopian urban geometry.

Foz do Iguaçu

Foz do Iguaçu is the Brazilian gateway to Iguazu Falls — 275 separate cataracts spanning 2.7 kilometres in a horseshoe of falling water that generates permanent rainbows, perpetual spray clouds, and a roar audible from kilometres away, making it the most overwhelming waterfall system on Earth by volume and spectacle. The Brazilian side of the national park delivers the panoramic walkway views of the full width of the falls, while the Argentine side at Misiones allows visitors to walk out to the Devil's Throat (Garganta del Diablo) directly above the largest single drop. Beyond the falls, the Itaipu hydroelectric dam — the world's largest operational by energy production — offers engineering tours of the dam face above the Paraná River that provide a very different form of Brazilian infrastructure awe.

Recife

Recife is the Venice of Brazil — a city built across three rivers on a series of small islands connected by 39 bridges, whose historic Recife Antigo district contains the oldest urban synagogue in the Americas (built 1636 during Dutch colonial rule) alongside Marco Zero plaza at the Prime Meridian of the Americas. The Boa Viagem beachfront, running 8 kilometres of urban beach past restaurants and high-rise apartment towers, is the largest city beach in South America and the social centrepiece of a city that is significantly more cosmopolitan than international visitors expect. The Instituto Ricardo Brennand, a private museum outside the city centre housing Dutch colonial paintings of Brazil (including a complete Frans Post collection) and a European arms collection in a Loire Valley-style castle, is the single most surprising museum encounter available in any Brazilian city.

Paraty

Paraty is the most perfectly preserved colonial port town in Brazil — its 18th-century streets paved with irregular stones that cause the highest tides to flood the lanes and clean them naturally, its whitewashed facades with blue and yellow window frames so complete that cars are banned from the historic centre. The town became a joint UNESCO World Heritage Site with the surrounding Atlantic Forest in 2019, the first such nomination in Brazil recognising the inseparability of a historic town from its natural context. The Paraty Literary Festival (FLIP), held each July since 2003, has made this small town of 42,000 people the most important literary event in the Portuguese-speaking world, attracting writers from across the globe to an audience of book-lovers who arrive by boat from Rio.

Belém

Belém is the great river city of the Amazon — a metropolis of 1.5 million at the mouth of the Pará River (the southern Amazon arm) whose Ver-o-Peso market, operating on the riverfront since 1688, sells river turtles, freshwater fish from species unknown in any other market on Earth, medicinal Amazonian roots, and açaí in its original form (a thick purple paste served with farinha, not a smoothie bowl). The Mangal das Garças ecological park on the riverfront, the neo-baroque Theatro da Paz, and the colonial districts of Cidade Velha and Campina represent the full colonial grandeur of an Amazon port city that once rivalled Manaus in rubber-era wealth. The Cabanagem history — the early 19th-century popular uprising that killed 30 percent of the Pará population in the most destructive rebellion in Brazilian history — is documented with unusual honesty in the city's historical museums.

Porto Alegre

Porto Alegre is Brazil's southernmost major city and its most European in atmosphere — a state capital of 1.5 million built on the eastern shore of the Guaíba river-lake where the afternoon light turns the water gold and the churrasco tradition (Brazil's barbecue culture originated here in the gaucho south) means that every weekend involves quantities of meat, chimichurri, and chimarrão (bitter gourd herb tea) regardless of what else is happening. The Bom Fim neighbourhood — Porto Alegre's student and cultural quarter — offers the most concentrated bar and gallery scene in the south, while the Mercado Público building, a neoclassical iron-and-glass market hall dating to 1869, is the best-preserved historic market in southern Brazil. The city is the gateway to the Serra Gaúcha wine country (Bento Gonçalves, 90 minutes north) and the Aparados da Serra Canyon, making it simultaneously a city destination and a regional exploration base of genuine quality.

Curitiba

Curitiba is Brazil's city of ideas — the state capital of Paraná that pioneered bus rapid transit in the 1970s (an innovation copied from Bogotá to Beijing), planted the Botanical Garden with its Victorian iron greenhouse, and commissioned Niemeyer to design the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (OMN), an enormous eye-shaped building elevated on a concrete column above the city's cultural district. The Wire Opera House, a concert venue built inside a former stone quarry whose rock walls form the venue's walls and ceiling, is one of the most unusual performance spaces in South America. The city's Santa Felicidade neighbourhood, settled by Italian immigrants in the late 19th century, produces the densest concentration of cantinas (Italian-Brazilian restaurants) per block of any neighbourhood in Brazil, serving pasta and wine to a local population that eats with a European seriousness about the table.

Gramado

Gramado is Brazil's most improbable town — a hill resort in the Serra Gaúcha that looks, sounds, and tastes like Bavaria, its half-timbered facades, fondue restaurants, chocolate shops, and Christmas lighting traditions transplanted so completely from central European immigrant culture that foreign visitors are routinely surprised to find themselves in South America. The surrounding Serra Gaúcha landscape of araucária pine, waterfalls, and stone canyon at the Parque da Ferradura delivers on the alpine promise the town makes, and the nearby Canela town (one valley over) adds the Caracol Falls waterfall and the Parque do Caracol canyon viewpoints within easy day-trip distance. The Gramado Christmas (Natal Luz) festival transforms the town into South America's most elaborately lit Christmas destination from November through January.

Bonito

Bonito is Brazil's eco-tourism laboratory — a small city in the Mato Grosso do Sul cerrado whose water table passes through limestone karst, emerging in rivers of supernatural clarity that allow snorkelling directly with schools of painted piraputanga, pacu, and dourado fish in conditions of visibility that make every encounter feel like a private aquarium. The Gruta do Lago Azul (Blue Lake Cave), accessible only in January and February when the angle of sunlight illuminates an underground lake of intense turquoise, is the most dramatically beautiful cave accessible to tourists in all of Brazil. The town's carrying-capacity management — mandatory guides, capped daily visitor numbers at each site — has made Bonito the model for sustainable nature tourism that every other Brazilian environmental attraction is urged to emulate.

Olinda

Olinda occupies a series of hills above Recife in the most intact colonial urban landscape in the Brazilian northeast — a UNESCO World Heritage Site of blue-painted churches, bougainvillea-draped walls, and craft studios that has been an artists' colony since the Portuguese first climbed the hill in the 1530s. The Olinda Carnaval, a city-wide street party through the colonial centro histórico, predates Rio's sambadrome by a century and is widely regarded by Brazilians themselves as the most authentic and joyful Carnaval celebration in the country. The Maracatu drums beating through the narrow streets of Amparo and the frevo dancers practising on the Praça do Carmo in the weeks before Carnaval create one of the most atmospherically charged anticipations of a festival found anywhere in the world.

Jericoacoara

Jericoacoara arrived at the end of a sand-track road through coastal dunes that requires a 4×4 or a horse — a deliberate inaccessibility that has preserved a former fishing village of unpaved streets, cashew trees, and hammock bars from the development that consumed every other beach on the Ceará coast. The Sunset Dune (Duna do Pôr do Sol) west of the village, where the entire population converges each evening to watch the sun sink into the Atlantic over a horizon of unbroken ocean, is one of those Brazilian rituals that inspires genuine quiet in people who specialise in noise. The constant trade winds that produced the sunset tradition have also made Jericoacoara the kite-surfing capital of South America, its flat-water lagoons and open-ocean stretches attracting professionals from across the world for a season that lasts eight months.

Búzios

Búzios is a peninsula of 23 beaches on the Costa do Sol east of Rio de Janeiro that Brigitte Bardot discovered in 1964 and that subsequently became the most glamorous beach resort in South America — still trading on that association but delivering genuinely on the promise of a sub-tropical marine environment of unusual clarity and variety within 170 kilometres of Rio. The Rua das Pedras in the village of Armação de Búzios is the most concentrated restaurant-and-bar strip in the Brazilian coastal resort circuit, its tables filling from 9 p.m. onwards with São Paulo and Rio weekenders whose dress code is emphatically post-beach. The schooner tours of the peninsula's 23 beaches, stopping for snorkelling at the Tartaruga and João Fernandinho coves, deliver tropical marine encounter of a quality that requires flight to Southeast Asia or the Caribbean to surpass.

Belo Horizonte

Belo Horizonte is Brazil's food capital by reputation among Brazilians — a city of 2.5 million whose Mercado Central market, open since 1929, sells cachaça, fresh cheese, and the pão de queijo (cheese bread) that Minas Gerais considers its most important contribution to Brazilian civilisation, and whose Savassi neighbourhood bar culture has produced the most imitated drinking-and-eating-at-the-same-time tradition (the boteco culture) in the country. The city is the gateway to the Minas colonial cities — Ouro Preto 100 km southeast, Diamantina 285 km north, Tiradentes 170 km south — making it the natural base for exploring the greatest concentration of 18th-century Baroque architecture outside Italy. The Pampulha Architectural Complex on the city's artificial lake — Niemeyer's Church of São Francisco de Assis with Portinari murals, the Cassino, and the Casa do Baile — was built in 1943 and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that predates Brasília by 17 years.