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 town an 18th-century gold rush built, and then left behind. Ouro Preto is a UNESCO site of churches, steep cobbled streets and hills — the best-preserved baroque landscape in the Americas, and the place to see Aleijadinho, the greatest artist Brazil has produced.

Mariana is 12 km away, and Congonhas, where Aleijadinho’s twelve soapstone prophets stand on a hillside terrace, is an hour and a quarter. Three days covers the town; four buys the prophets. It is landlocked, mountainous, and it is also the country’s food capital.

The capital of Minas Gerais, a planned city with no beach and no colonial core, and better than most visitors expect. Around the lake at Pampulha, Oscar Niemeyer built a church, a casino, a dance hall and a yacht club in the early 1940s, and UNESCO listed them in 2016.

An hour and a half out of town, Inhotim spreads contemporary art through a botanical garden, and it wants a full day of its own. Back in the city, the cooking of Minas is easiest to eat here, from the Mercado Central to the botecos. Ouro Preto is two hours away and has its own page.

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.

A 1,500 square kilometer field of white sand dunes, and it is not a desert. It gets around 1,600mm of rain a year, roughly three hundred times what falls on the Sahara. That rain collects in the valleys between the dunes, sitting on impermeable rock beneath the sand, and forms thousands of clear freshwater lagoons.

The lagoons fill from about June and drain through the second half of the year. ICMBio names no month as the fullest, so nor do we; on the rainfall August is the pick, effectively dry with the water still holding. Barreirinhas makes the easiest base. Atins and Santo Amaro suit quieter stays. The best version of a visit is the multi-day crossing on foot, sleeping in oasis settlements between the dunes.

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 wind is the thing to time a trip around. It blows hardest from about July into January, which is also the dry half of the year, and that is when the kite and windsurf crowd fills the village. Getting in still means a transfer over sand for the last stretch, so Jeri stays harder to reach than the map makes it look.

A volcanic archipelago 350 kilometers offshore, and a UNESCO site. It is also one of the most protected and most expensive places 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 come into Baía dos Golfinhos most mornings and sea turtles are there year-round. What actually decides the trip, though, is the arithmetic: a per-day environmental tax, a separate national park ticket on top of it, and flights from only two mainland cities. The destination page prices a week.

The coast where Portugal first sighted Brazil in 1500, and today one municipality with a town and three villages in it that could not be less alike. Porto Seguro has the airport, a listed hill town and the big party beaches. Across the river by ferry, Arraial d’Ajuda sits on a hill over reef-sheltered beaches.

Trancoso is the one people actually come for: a village laid out around a long grass square with a white church at the end, and rooms and restaurants at the top of the local market. Further south the road runs out at Caraíva, a village with no cars at all.

A short drive south of Recife's airport, and the whole visit turns on the tide. A reef sits offshore, and when the water drops it leaves a line of clear pools between the rock and the sand. When the water is up, they are simply sea, and there is nothing to see.

That makes this the one place in the region you plan around a tide table rather than a forecast. Jangadas, the local sailing rafts, carry people out to the pools at low water. The village behind the beach is compact and busy, and the quieter sand runs north to Muro Alto and south to Maracaípe.

The airport for this whole stretch of coast, and a beach city in its own right rather than somewhere to change planes. Apartment towers stand behind a long swimming beach, the Beira Mar promenade runs for kilometers, and the city's own beach culture is east at Praia do Futuro, where the barracas are the point rather than the scenery.

It works as the bookend to a Ceará trip: a couple of days in the city, then a day out along each coast. West are the dune beaches and the road that eventually reaches Jericoacoara. East are the cliffs and the quieter sand. Most people give it a morning between flights, which is the habit this page argues with.

A village on top of a red cliff, on a coast that is almost all cliff, with a string of coves at the bottom of it. You are not choosing a beach here, you are choosing which cove, and you walk between them along the sand.

The tide runs the day. The Baía dos Golfinhos, where dolphins live year-round, is reached on foot only at low water, so the first thing to check is the tide table rather than the forecast. Natal's airport is about an hour and a half north.

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 since 1625, when it was a crown weigh-station, and its iron pavilion went up in 1901. Nearby, Marajó island sits at the river mouth. It's roughly the size of Switzerland, has almost as many water buffalo as 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.

There is a southern Pantanal too, reached from Campo Grande, and it is a different trip: working cattle fazendas, horseback riding, birding and night drives, with far fewer jaguars and more of a sense of a place where people live and work. It pairs naturally with Bonito, three hours away. Our guide covers the northern half, which is the one people book for the cats.

A high quartzite plateau north of Brasília, cut by rivers into canyons and waterfalls, and covered in cerrado, the savanna of central Brazil. The national park, listed by UNESCO in 2001, has its gate in the village of São Jorge; Alto Paraíso, 38 km away, is the bigger base.

Much of what people come for lies outside the park on private land, the Vale da Lua above all, and to the north the Kalunga quilombola communities run their own waterfalls. The flights land in Brasília, just under four hours away by road.

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.

Two small mountain towns side by side on the edge of the plateau, at about 830 meters, and the closest Brazil comes to a real winter: fog in the streets, frost on cold mornings, and a town that runs on fondue, chocolate and fireplaces. Gramado turned to tourism on purpose in the 1950s, and its Alpine look was adopted for visitors.

Around the towns are araucaria forests and the Caracol waterfall, and Natal Luz fills Gramado for almost three months from late October. The wine country of the Vale dos Vinhedos, around Bento Gonçalves, is an hour or two away as a day trip.