Insight Guides: Brazil

How To Use This E-Book

Getting around the e-book

This Insight Guide e-book is designed to give you inspiration for your visit to Brazil, as well as comprehensive planning advice to make sure you have the best travel experience. The guide begins with detailed features on history, people and culture that paint a vivid portrait of contemporary life. The extensive Places chapters give a complete guide to all the sights and areas worth visiting. The Travel Tips provide full information on getting around, hotels, activities from to culture to shopping to sport, plus a wealth of practical information to help you plan your trip.

In the Table of Contents and throughout this e-book you will see hyperlinked references. Just tap a hyperlink once to skip to the section you would like to read. Practical information and listings are also hyperlinked, so as long as you have an external connection to the internet, you can tap a link to go directly to the website for more information.

Maps

All key attractions and sights in Brazil are numbered and cross-referenced to high-quality maps. Wherever you see the reference [map] just tap this to go straight to the related map. You can also double-tap any map for a zoom view.

Images

Youll find hundreds of beautiful high-resolution images that capture the essence of Brazil. Simply double-tap on an image to see it full-screen.

About Insight Guides

Insight Guides have more than 40 years experience of publishing high-quality, visual travel guides. We produce 400 full-colour titles, in both print and digital form, covering more than 200 destinations across the globe, in a variety of formats to meet your different needs.

Insight Guides are written by local authors who use their on-the-ground expertise to provide the very latest information and extensive historical and cultural background. All the reviews in an Insight Guides are independent; we strive to maintain an impartial view. Our reviews are selected to guide to you the best places to stay and eat, so you can be confident that when we say a restaurant or hotel is really special, we really mean it.

Like all Insight Guides , this e-book contains hundreds of beautiful photographs to inspire and inform your travel. We commission most of our own photography, because we strive to capture the essence of a destination using original images that you wont find anywhere else.

2012 Apa Publications (UK) Ltd

Introduction: A Land without Frontiers

Visitors have always been slightly dazed by the sheer size of the country and its hidden riches; Brazilians are no less captivated

Since its colonization by the Portuguese in the 16th century, Brazil has held a constant fascination for foreigners. First it was gold, then rubber and coffee, and more recently, the exotic sights and sounds of the nation. For Brazilians, too, it is an intriguing land. There is a feeling that, hidden in some far corner of this great nation, there may be an immense treasure just waiting to be discovered. The main problem lies in identifying the corner.

Brazilians and foreigners alike have been gradually occupying the enormous empty spaces of this continent-sized country ever since the 16th century. They have populated them with some 193 million souls, composing one of the worlds most heterogeneous populations. They live amid modern splendor in sprawling cities and in squalid deprivation in rural backwaters. They work in high-tech industries and push wooden plows behind laboring beasts. Within the confines of this country live indigenous people in near Stone Age conditions, semi-feudal peasants and landlords, pioneers hacking out jungle settlements, and wealthy entrepreneurs and business people.

Perhaps nowhere on earth is the process of development as tangible as in Brazil. The dynamism of the country is its greatest achievement. Even in periods of stagnation, Brazilians continue to get on with the process of nation-building, and can now look forward to the responsibility of hosting the world at the FIFA World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2016.

Brazilians are united by a common language, Portuguese; a common religion, Catholicism (though mixed with indigenous faiths); and a common dream that Brazil will be a great nation. Despite enormous social and economic difficulties, Brazilians are a remarkably spontaneous, enthusiastic, and high-spirited people, who tend to live in the moment. After all, at any moment, you may just find treasure.

Brazils Top 10 Attractions

Amazing beaches, a vast array of wildlife, and historical colonial towns are only a sample of the best that Brazil has to offer. Here are the top sights you simply have to see