Bill's Excellent Adventures: Brazil ~ Random Surprises

Two of Brazil's significant sites require four-hour drives from Rio, but I finally spent a few days exploring both, after hanging out in Rio for two lazy weeks.

Paraty

Only a few colonial places in the world rival Paraty for so many blocks of architectural "purity," unblemished by any post-colonial structures. Paraty is lauded by preservationists as one of the world's most uncompromising, large historical enclaves.

Its historic core consists of roughly 30 blocks — dating mostly from the mid-1600s to the early 1700s — that remain entirely free of modern buildings.
The area is car free.
All electrical, phone, and other cables are routed underground.
Strict rules require white façades with historically accurate trim colors.
Businesses can only have small, discreet, flat signs.
Modernity such as AC units must be hidden from street view.
Preservationists even kept the original, bumpy, oversized cobblestones.

These rules combined to create a beautiful time capsule taking you back to the 1700s surrounded by Portuguese coastal colonial architecture.

Cartagena, Colombia, and Antigua, Guatemala, also have large areas with "visual integrity" but do not quite match Paraty's totally unblemished scale.

By chance, I visited on a day when the tide was high enough to flood part of Paraty creating photogenic mirrors in those watery streets.

At the peak of high tide, I enjoyed spending lots of time taking photos of the scenically flooded streets. Above are three of my favorites.

Once you have been transported back centuries and savored your surroundings, what else is there to do? In the evenings, many good restaurants set up tables in the streets, and a number of stores featured excellent local art and crafts or Brazilian coastal fashion.

Alas, most of the historic churches were under repair or were randomly closed when I was there. I did slip into a Mass at the small Church of Our Lady of the Rosary and Saint Benedict. The other photo is the Parish Church of Our Lady of Remedies in the main plaza.

Miraculously, I did not twist an ankle on Paraty's treacherous, old cobblestones.

The road north to Aparecida went through the "Atlantic Forest South-East Reserves," a protected tropical rainforest. Above is the view looking back toward the coast.

Aparecida

The second largest church in the world (by most measures) is located in this small city. Its full name is the "Cathedral Basilica of the National Shrine of Our Lady of Aparecida." For short it can be called the Aparecida Basilica.

My hotel room was mediocre but had the vista I wanted. Above is my view at sunset and below is the view the next morning. Consecrated in 1980, the Aparecida Basilica is a huge modern Neo-Romanesque church with, as you can see, rounded arches and plain lines — no Gothic ornamentation.

The original exterior was considered too austere and industrial (see old photo on the left), so in the early 2000s, enormous mosaics of Biblical scenes were added. (I would have added clean, geometric mosaics to the exterior and confined the busy Biblical images to the interior, but they forgot to ask me.)

Left:
I expected the interior to feel even longer. From the back, you can see that the nave does not have as many rows of pews as one might expect for such a large building. However, the space is distributed differently — with large transepts, side chapels, and pilgrimage areas — so the central area feels more compact than its overall size suggests.

Upper Right:
My photo of "Our Lady of Aparecida," a small statue found by fishermen in the 1700s and venerated as the patroness of Brazil. The cathedral was built in her name.
Lower Right:
Took the cable car from the cathedral complex to a hilltop tower, realized I had no photos of myself, and at least got this silhouette that software failed to fix.

In front of the basilica is a semicircular colonnade with statues of the apostles. At sunset from the elevator at my hotel, I caught this shot.

But there is more... I'm including two other "random surprises" in this post.

Macapá

In the far north, Macapá is the capital of Amapá, one of Brazil's states that I had not yet visited. (Remaining states are in green on the map.)

Macapá has about a half million residents and is the poorest state capital in Brazil. Its isolated location does not help. It exports timber and minerals from Amapá's interior.

Locals were surprised to learn I was a tourist and not forced to visit on business. But I always find the obscure corners of Brazil to be interesting.

Flying in, we had a good view of Macapá's location by the wide northern channel of the complex Amazon Delta.

The city has a nice, clean waterfront with parks and piers. People gather in the evenings to enjoy the Amazon breezes. I enjoyed some nice walks here during each sunset. Above is the Trapiche Eliezer Levy, a popular long pier for evening strolls.

The equator runs right through the city and civic leaders cleverly decided to make the most of it. They constructed a park called Meio do Mundo (Middle of the World)!

The Marco Zero do Equador monument marking the equator is nice, but the coolest thing at the park is the ~~soccer~~ football stadium where the halfway line is more or less on the equator. Teams defend different hemispheres! (Apparently it is not exact but close enough.)

In the 1700s, the Portuguese built the Fortress of Saint Joseph (Fortaleza de São José de Macapá) to defend the Amazon from Dutch and English invasions — and especially to keep out the French who ruled neighboring French Guiana.

I also enjoyed the markets and the open-air Museu Sacaca featuring various dwellings and other elements of indigenous Amazonian cultures. My three days in Macapá were enjoyable and exceeded expectations.

Balneário Camboriú

This may be the oddest city I've ever seen. Balneário Camboriú is on the coast south of Sao Paulo, and only has about 150,000 residents — but it has

Seven of Brazil's ten tallest buildings!
The highest residential tower in Latin America!
Beach real estate that is more expensive than in Rio!
The nickname the "Dubai of Brazil" due to all its skyscrapers and millionaires!

I'd never heard of Balneário Camboriú until just a couple of years ago when I saw images so bizarre that I thought they were AI generated.

In fact, starting in the 1990s, the state of Santa Catarina unleashed developers and encouraged soaring, dramatic buildings. The results are weird and wild, but the hyper‑vertical beachfront gamble paid off.

This Wikivoyage photo shows the striking skyline strip that is wildly out of scale with the small, low-rise city behind it.

From the beach, Balneário Camboriú looks like a metropolis with millions of residents, but step a block inland and the density evaporates.

I took this photo from the top of a big Ferris Wheel on an overcast day, and it still seemed surreal to see the shiny coastal row of luxury towers lined up front of the short, tawdry old town.

So many unique and surprising places to see in Brazil, including the four in this post —