The Centro-Oeste is Brazil's interior: Goiás, Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul, with the capital, Brasília, planted in the middle of it in 1960. It is cattle and soya country, flat and enormous, but it holds three of Brazil's finest natural areas.
The Pantanal is the largest tropical wetland in the world, and the best place in the Americas to see wildlife: jaguars on the riverbanks, giant otters, capybaras, caimans by the thousand and hyacinth macaws. The northern Pantanal is reached from Cuiabá along the Transpantaneira; the southern from Campo Grande and Corumbá.
South of it, Bonito has rivers so clear that floating down them with a snorkel is like looking into an aquarium; Nobres is its quieter northern equivalent. Above Cuiabá, the red cliffs and waterfalls of the Chapada dos Guimarães rise from the plains.
In Goiás, the Chapada dos Veadeiros, reached from Alto Paraíso de Goiás and Cavalcante, is a high plateau of canyons and waterfalls in the cerrado savanna, and the colonial towns of Pirenópolis and Goiás Velho keep the feel of the gold-rush eighteenth century.
The dry season, May to September, is the time for almost everything here — the Pantanal's wildlife gathers around the shrinking water, and the Chapada trails are at their best.
