Travel in Brazil: a coast full of neighbours and an interior reached by air

Who comes to Brazil and from where

Two sources give slightly different pictures of 2025. The trade publication Moodie Davitt, reporting Embratur's figures before the year was out, put arrivals above nine million for the first time, 40% up on 2024 with December still to be confirmed. The Wikipedia article on tourism in Brazil, citing Embratur and the Ministry of Tourism, gives the final count as 9,287,196 visitors from 205 countries, a rise of 37% on the previous record set in 2024. Both put Argentina far in front.

Over the full year of 2025 the Argentine figure passed 3.3 million. Outside the Americas the largest groups came from the United Kingdom, France, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Italy and China, and arrivals from Europe and Asia together rose by more than 20%.

The growth is recent: the Wikipedia series gives 5.16 million arrivals in 2010. Two states take the largest share. São Paulo received almost 2.5 million international tourists between January and November 2025 and Rio de Janeiro 1,972,928, and the two cities, with two international airports each, handle most of the country's international air traffic.

The flights show the same climb: Embratur's data panel recorded 68,872 landings from abroad between January and November 2025, 17.7% more than a year earlier.

Foreign visitors spent US$7.3 billion in 2024, according to the Central Bank, and the Wikipedia article gives US$7.9 billion for 2025. The money has long flowed the other way as well. Brazilians spend more abroad than foreigners spend in Brazil; in 2007 the gap was US$3.26 billion, and Uruguay, Argentina and the United States are among their preferred destinations.

Why most trips stay near the sea

Brazilian tourism was built on the coast because the country was. Britannica records that most visitors go to Rio de Janeiro and other places in or near cities with an established hotel trade. Salvador and the rest of Bahia draw large numbers, more holidaymakers each year travel to other stretches of the northeastern coast, and in the South the beaches of Santa Catarina draw large crowds of Argentines. The UNESCO listings follow the same line: Rio de Janeiro was inscribed in 2012 as a landscape between the mountains and the sea, and the Discovery Coast of Bahia and the Atlantic Forest reserves of the Southeast in 1999.

Brazilians themselves are the larger market, and Britannica notes that a growing number of them travel the country by car and by plane on their holidays. In 2005, 51 million Brazilians travelled within the country and made ten times as many trips as foreign visitors, spending five times as much. São Paulo state received 27.7% of those domestic trips, Minas Gerais 10.8%, Rio de Janeiro 8.4%, Bahia 7.4% and Santa Catarina 7.2%. More than half the trips, 53.1%, were to visit friends and family, and 40.8% were for sun and beach. Tourism accounted for 7% of direct and indirect employment in 2005, and in 2006 direct employment in the sector reached 1.87 million people.

The calendar matters too. Carnaval falls forty-six days before Easter and its festivities are concentrated in the coastal cities; Embratur recorded 88,600 international flight reservations for the Carnaval week of 7 to 15 February 2026 by early December 2025. The country's holidays page gives the dates.

What each region is visited for

The Wikipedia article on tourism groups the country's destinations by region, and the lists show how differently each part of Brazil is used.

The Southeast holds the two big cities and the colonial interior. Rio de Janeiro draws visitors for its beaches and its setting between the granite domes and Guanabara Bay, and it hosted the Summer Olympics and Paralympics of 2016. On the state's coast lie Angra dos Reis, Paraty and Ilha Grande, and in its mountains Petrópolis, home of the Imperial Museum. São Paulo is visited above all on business. Minas Gerais is the destination for cultural and historic tourism: Ouro Preto, Mariana, Congonhas, São João del-Rei, Tiradentes and Diamantina, the churches carved and decorated in the eighteenth century by Aleijadinho among them.

The Northeast sells its coast. Salvador, whose historic centre of tiled houses and ornate churches was inscribed in 1985, is a UNESCO City of Music with a Carnaval of strong African character. Along the northeastern coast lie beach towns such as Porto Seguro, Porto de Galinhas, Maragogi and Jericoacoara, and inland lie the plateaus of the Chapada Diamantina.

The South has the falls and the beaches. Foz do Iguaçu is the base for the Iguaçu Falls, Florianópolis and Santa Catarina Island draw the beach crowds, and the Serra Gaúcha, with Gramado and Canela, draws visitors to the hills. In Rio Grande do Sul the Paleorrota geopark covers 83,000 square kilometres of rock holding fossils between 210 and 290 million years old.

The Center-West and the North are visited for their wild country. Bonito, Chapada dos Guimarães and the Pantanal around Corumbá and Poconé are the Center-West destinations the tourism lists name, and in the Amazon Britannica describes ecotourism as moderately popular. Manaus, which the rubber boom turned into a city with an opera house, and Belém are its gateways by air and river.

How the distances are crossed

The mainland stretches about 4,395 kilometres from north to south and about 4,319 kilometres from east to west. Britannica describes a country whose coastal regions were long linked only by ship and a few short roads while the interior stayed an isolated frontier.

Air is how the interior is reached. Every state capital and major city has an airport, some 1,500 smaller towns have airstrips, and São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and Brasília are linked by air shuttles. Brasília lies about 930 kilometres northwest of Rio de Janeiro, and when it was built in the late 1950s many heavy materials had to be flown in during the rains.

The roads came after. The military government made paving a priority from 1964, and a network of paved highways now connects the main cities, including several in the Amazon, but paved roads are about a tenth of the total and the long highways across the Amazon are hard to maintain. Roads carry the great majority of passengers, and cheap intercity buses compete with the air shuttles.

Railways carry almost nobody between cities. Britannica lists them as important only for bulk ore and for commuter lines around Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Brasília, and few new lines of any size have been built since the Second World War.

In the North the rivers are the roads. Brazil has some 50,000 kilometres of navigable waterways. Belém and Manaus, 1,600 kilometres up the Amazon, are the main river ports, and smaller boats continue up the Madeira to Porto Velho in Rondônia and up the main river to Iquitos in Peru.

Which towns the gold and sugar built

Much of what Brazil keeps from the colony was paid for by gold or sugar, and UNESCO has listed a string of those towns.

Brasília itself was inscribed in 1987, a planned capital with its public buildings by Oscar Niemeyer. Other cultural sites carry other parts of the story. The ruins of the Jesuit mission of São Miguel das Missões in Rio Grande do Sul are listed with four missions across the border in Argentina, inscribed in 1983 and 1984. São Francisco Square in São Cristóvão, Sergipe, was added in 2010, the modernist Pampulha ensemble in 2016 and the garden estate of the landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx in 2021. In all Brazil had 26 sites on the World Heritage List by 2026, sixteen of them cultural, nine natural and one mixed; the most recent, inscribed in 2026, are the Amazonia Theaters.

What visitors come to eat and watch

The festivals are the reason many visitors come at a particular time. In Rio de Janeiro the samba schools parade through the Sambadrome, the 85,000-seat grandstand Oscar Niemeyer designed in 1984, and neighbourhoods across the city are hung with streamers and lights; Recife dances frevo, and Salvador's Carnaval runs on axé. Belém has the Círio de Nazaré and Maranhão its Bumba-meu-boi. All three regional traditions are on UNESCO's intangible heritage list.

Food varies by region. Feijoada is served across the country and churrascarias, steak houses, abound everywhere, while Bahia fries its acarajé in palm oil and the South drinks chimarrão. The culture article covers the music and the kitchen in more depth.

Where visitors sleep also follows the map. Britannica records that most luxury hotels are in Rio de Janeiro, that there are large spas, hotels and resorts in the highlands of Minas Gerais and at the Iguaçu Falls, and that hotel building has boomed in the cities of the Northeast and the South.

Where the wild places are

The natural sites lie mostly far from the coast. Iguaçu National Park in Paraná, created in 1939 and inscribed by UNESCO in 1986, holds the falls where the Iguaçu drops over a rim of diabase rock. The Pantanal Conservation Area in the west was inscribed in 2000, the Central Amazon Conservation Complex in 2000 and 2003, and the Cerrado parks of Chapada dos Veadeiros and Emas in 2001. The Lençóis Maranhenses National Park in Maranhão was added in 2024 and the Peruaçu River Canyon in 2025. Offshore, Fernando de Noronha and the Rocas Atoll were inscribed together.

Britannica notes that many older national parks lie near cities, while the newer ones were set up in remote regions at the headwaters of Amazon tributaries or beside biological reserves and Indigenous territories, with conservation as their purpose and no plan to handle crowds. The Wikipedia article on tourism names Bonito in Mato Grosso do Sul as the centre of Brazilian ecotourism. Serra da Capivara National Park in Piauí was inscribed in 1991.

When the weather suits which region

The seasons are set by the geography. The central highlands take their rain between November and April, much of it in heavy downpours. From May to October they are dry. The Amazon is wet most of the year but has a dry season of three to five months, its timing depending on whether a place lies north or south of the equator. The northeastern interior is hot and dry, with daytime temperatures above 38°C in the dry season, while the coast from Rio de Janeiro to Recife stays warm all year and is cooled by trade winds. In the South the winters of June to August bring frost, and snow falls in the highest parts of Paraná, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul. The geography article sets out the climate in full.

The country spans four time zones, from UTC−5 in Acre to UTC−2 on Fernando de Noronha, and Brasília and the populous coast keep UTC−3 all year.