Explore Brazil by region

The city most people picture. Rio is the most famous city in Brazil, and it delivers on the picture in your head. Six million people live wrapped around granite peaks, rainforest and a string of beaches. You can see the whole layout in one glance from Corcovado or Sugarloaf.

Three days covers the list: Christ the Redeemer, Sugarloaf, Copacabana and Ipanema, and the restored port district around Praça Mauá. A fourth day turns a checklist into a trip. Hike up Pedra Bonita or Morro Dois Irmãos in the morning, spend the afternoon in the Jardim Botânico, catch sunset at Arpoador, and eat dinner in Santa Teresa or Lapa.

The Brazil most visitors skip. Minas is landlocked, mountainous, and built on an 18th-century gold rush. That history left behind a string of baroque towns: Ouro Preto, Tiradentes, São João del-Rei, Diamantina, Congonhas. Together they form one of the best-preserved colonial landscapes in the Americas.

It is also the country's food capital. Not fine dining: pão de queijo, feijão tropeiro, slow-cooked pork, cachaça from small stills, and coffee grown up the road. Add Inhotim, an open-air contemporary art museum set in a botanical garden, and Minas becomes a three-or-four-day loop that resets what you expect from this country.

No cars, no roads, no ATMs. Ilha Grande sits an hour's boat ride off the Costa Verde. It was a leper colony, then a maximum-security prison, and that grim history is the reason the forest was never cleared. Most of the island is now protected parkland.

You arrive at Vila do Abraão and walk from there, or take a boat. Reach Lopes Mendes on foot through the forest, or by boat and a short walk. People regularly call it the best beach in Brazil, and it earns the claim.

Salvador served as the capital of Portuguese Brazil from 1549 to 1763, and its port handled more of the Atlantic slave trade than any other in the Americas. Its historic upper town, the Pelourinho, packs baroque churches and 17th- and 18th-century houses into a dense grid, painted in colors you wouldn't otherwise put together.

The culture here is not archived. Capoeira plays out in the squares, candomblé terreiros stay active, and Olodum drums through the streets on Tuesday nights. The food culture, acarajé, moqueca, vatapá, stands apart from anywhere else in Brazil. South of the city, the Bahian coast runs through Morro de São Paulo, Itacaré and the cacao country around Ilhéus.

Jericoacoara began as a fishing village inside a national park, with no paved roads, no street lights and, for a long time, no electricity. It still has sand streets, and everyone still walks up the big dune to watch the sunset. It's well-known now, but the protections have held, and it has aged better than most places that get discovered.

The Rota das Emoções strings Jeri together with the Delta do Parnaíba and the Lençóis Maranhenses by 4x4 and boat, crossing three states. It stands out as one of the more adventurous overland journeys in Brazil.

A volcanic archipelago 350 kilometers offshore, and a UNESCO site. It's also the most protected and most expensive place to travel in Brazil. Visitor numbers are capped, a daily environmental fee applies, and access to the marine park stays limited. That's exactly why the diving and snorkeling here rank as the best in the country.

Spinner dolphins arrive in the hundreds in Baía dos Golfinhos most mornings. Sea turtles live here year-round, and visibility routinely passes thirty meters. Beaches like Baía do Sancho regularly top global rankings.

Almost every Amazon trip starts here. Manaus is a strange, compelling city of two million people with no road connection to the rest of Brazil. It has an ornate 1896 opera house built at the height of the rubber boom, and a floating port that rises and falls fourteen meters a year with the river.

From here you choose your Amazon. Lodges on the Rio Negro, two to four hours out, are the most common and the easiest. They offer canopy towers, night canoe safaris, piranha fishing, pink river dolphins, and visits to riverine communities. Go further, to the Anavilhanas archipelago or the Mamirauá reserve, and both the wildlife and the sense of remoteness increase sharply.

Belém sits where the Amazon reaches the Atlantic, and it's the best place in Brazil to eat Amazonian food. Try tucupi, jambu, tacacá, and açaí served the way it's eaten here: savory, with fish, not as a smoothie bowl.

The Ver-o-Peso market has run for over 400 years and remains the largest open-air market in Latin America. Nearby, Marajó island sits at the river mouth. It's bigger than Switzerland, has more water buffalo than people, and stays almost entirely off the tourist map.

The northern Pantanal is the jaguar half. Reach it via Cuiabá and the Transpantaneira road down to Porto Jofre. You spend days in small boats on the Cuiabá and Três Irmãos rivers, where a network of guides radios sightings to one another. That's why the success rate runs so high. Giant otters, capybara and caiman stay in constant company.

The southern Pantanal, from Campo Grande, runs quieter. It centers on working cattle fazendas, horseback riding, birding and night drives. You'll see fewer jaguars, but get more of a sense of a place where people live and work. Many trips combine one of these with Bonito, three hours away.

A high quartz plateau three hours north of Brasília, and the best of the cerrado, Brazil's savanna, which covers a fifth of the country and gets almost no visitors. It offers canyons, waterfalls, natural rock waterslides, and some of the darkest night skies in the country.

The base towns, Alto Paraíso and São Jorge, carry a distinctly alternative character. It grew up around the plateau's reputation among Brazilians as a place with unusual energy. Take that as you like. The walking stands out either way.

Two hundred and seventy-five waterfalls over 2.7 kilometers, most violent at the Devil's Throat, where fourteen separate falls converge into one gorge and throw up spray you can see for kilometers. Both countries run a national park here, and you want both. Brazil gives you the panorama. Argentina puts you on catwalks directly above and beside the water.

Plan a full day per side. Add the Macuco Safari boat, which runs you under the falls, and the Parque das Aves, a serious bird rehabilitation center rather than a zoo, where you walk through aviaries with toucans and macaws. Itaipu Dam, once the largest hydroelectric plant in the world, sits nearby if that interests you.

Italian immigrants arrived in these hills in the 1870s and planted grapes. The Vale dos Vinhedos around Bento Gonçalves is now Brazil's first controlled-origin wine region. The sparkling wine stands out especially, and almost none of it leaves the country.

An hour away, Gramado and Canela are alpine-styled mountain towns built around chocolate, fondue and, from October to January, one of the largest Christmas festivals in the world. It leans fully into kitsch, and Brazilians love it for exactly that.