Porto Alegre takes its literary culture seriously — Mário Quintana spent forty years writing poems in a hotel room here, and the city's intellectual tradition runs deep — so it is fitting that it has one of the best bookshops in Brazil. The Livraria Cultura branch in the Praia de Belas shopping centre is a large, well-stocked store with excellent sections on Brazilian literature, history, and regional studies, good children's books, and a café inside the shop that is considerably better than most in-store cafés. It hosts regular author events and book launches.
For travellers, the most useful sections are the regional history and Brazilian literature collections: this is where you buy your Mário Quintana poetry in translation (if you are lucky), the novels of Erico Verissimo (Rio Grande do Sul's greatest prose writer, and better than his international obscurity suggests), and the history books about the Farroupilha revolution and the gaúcho tradition that you will want to read on the plane home. The staff are genuinely knowledgeable and can help you find things. The Praia de Belas mall itself is otherwise unremarkable, but the bookshop is worth the trip.