Brazil is the largest country in South America, bigger than the contiguous United States, and it borders every other country on the continent except Chile and Ecuador. People arrive expecting beaches, carnival and football, and find all three — along with half of the Amazon, the best wildlife-watching on the continent, some of the finest colonial architecture in the Americas, and a food and music culture as varied as its people, who speak Portuguese, not Spanish.
It is also a country of enormous distances, and the first decision is where to go. Brazil divides into five regions, and each is a trip in itself.
The Sudeste holds both great cities: Rio de Janeiro, which lives up to its setting, and São Paulo, South America's biggest city and its restaurant capital. Between them lie the baroque gold towns of Minas Gerais — Ouro Preto above all — and the Costa Verde of Paraty and Ilha Grande, where rainforest meets the sea.
The Nordeste is Brazil's beach coast and its cultural root: Afro-Brazilian Salvador, the carnival towns of Recife and Olinda, the marine park of Fernando de Noronha, and in the north the dunes and rain-filled lagoons of the Lençóis Maranhenses.
The Norte is the Amazon, reached through Manaus and Belém, with river beaches at Alter do Chão and the wildlife of flooded forest at Mamirauá.
The Centro-Oeste is the interior around the modernist capital, Brasília: the Pantanal, the best place in the Americas to see a jaguar; the clear rivers of Bonito; and the plateaus of the Chapada dos Veadeiros.
The Sul is temperate, European-settled Brazil, with Iguaçu Falls at its western edge, the island beaches of Florianópolis, the canyons of Aparados da Serra and the wine country of the Vale dos Vinhedos.
Domestic flights are the only practical way to combine regions, and a two- or three-week trip is best built around two of them rather than all five. Carnival, in February or early March, is the one date worth planning a year around — in Rio, Salvador or Olinda, each very different.
