The Museu Nacional de Imigração e Colonização occupies a long, palm-lined building in the centre of town and tells the story of European settlement in southern Brazil — Germans, Norwegians, Swiss and Italians who arrived from the 1850s onwards to clear forest and farm the coastal plain.
The rooms are full of furniture, clothing, agricultural tools, religious objects, and the strange small possessions immigrant families carried across the Atlantic. The avenue of imperial palms outside, planted by the original settlers, is itself protected as a national heritage site. Allow an hour for the museum and another twenty minutes for the gardens.