The Most Beautiful Places in Brazil
44 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Brazil are Lençóis Maranhenses National Park, Iguaçu Falls and Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading. The list covers 44 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Brazil is shaped by rock and water on a continental scale. Along the Atlantic coast, ancient granite and gneiss domes rise straight out of the sea, most famously around Rio de Janeiro; inland, the vast basalt plateau of the Paraná basin breaks into steps that rivers pour over; in the north, the Amazon carries more water than any other river. Over this land lie Jesuit missions, gold-rush Baroque, rubber-boom opulence and the bold modernism of the twentieth century.
Rio holds a remarkable cluster. Sugarloaf Mountain guards the entrance to Guanabara Bay, reached by a cable car first opened in 1912, while Christ the Redeemer, completed in 1931, spreads its arms over the city from the summit of Corcovado. Below, the Botanical Garden, founded in 1808, is known for its avenue of royal palms, the São Bento Monastery hides a gilded Baroque interior, and Santiago Calatrava's Museum of Tomorrow reaches out over the harbour.
Further afield, Iguaçu Falls spreads hundreds of separate cascades along the edge of the basalt plateau on the Argentine border. In Maranhão, Lençóis Maranhenses fills the hollows between white dunes with rainwater lagoons, and in the south Aparados da Serra cuts sheer canyons into the plateau. The Amazon Theatre in Manaus, opened in 1896, is the rubber boom in stone and glass, São Miguel das Missões preserves the ruined church of a Guaraní mission, and in Brasília the Juscelino Kubitschek Bridge skips across Lake Paranoá on three steel arches.
In this list
01 Lençóis Maranhenses National Park
Parque Nacional dos Lençóis Maranhenses
Brazil2.483° S 43.133° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Julius Dadalti · CC BY-SA 4.0 Lençóis Maranhenses means "bedsheets of Maranhão" — the name comes straight from the shape of the dunes, whose parallel ridges look like a tangle of linens left out to dry. That image already hints at the park's real trick: this looks like a desert, but it isn't one.
Did you know? In the rainy season the lagoons cover around 41 percent of the park's area of some 155,000 hectares.
02 Iguaçu Falls
Cataratas do Iguaçu
Brazil · 21.2 km from Foz do Iguaçu25.695° S 54.437° W
Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz) · CC BY-SA 4.0 The rock under Iguaçu is 130 million years old and volcanic, laid down when massive flood-basalt eruptions covered a huge swath of what would become southern Brazil and Argentina in repeated lava flows, some sequences over a kilometre thick.
Did you know? On seeing the falls, Eleanor Roosevelt is said to have exclaimed simply, Poor Niagara!
03 Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading
Real Gabinete Português de Leitura
Brazil · 3.1 km from Rio de Janeiro22.905° S 43.182° W
Stegop · CC BY-SA 4.0 Behind a carved stone façade on a narrow street in central Rio de Janeiro lies one of the most spectacular reading rooms in the world.
Did you know? The society behind the library was founded on 14 May 1837 by 43 Portuguese immigrants, many of them political refugees.
04 Sugarloaf Mountain
Pão de Açúcar
Brazil · 7.4 km from Rio de Janeiro22.949° S 43.157° W
Image by guertzen from Pixabay Sugarloaf Mountain is the rock that makes Rio's harbour instantly recognisable: a bare, rounded dome of gneiss rising 396 metres straight out of the sea at the mouth of Guanabara Bay.
Did you know? The cable car has carried around 40 million passengers since it opened, and each current cabin holds up to 65 people.
05 Baía do Sancho
Brazil3.854° S 32.444° W
Andrei · CC BY 2.0 Fernando de Noronha is a small volcanic archipelago of 21 islands some 350 km off the north-east coast of Brazil, and Baía do Sancho is the jewel of its main island.
Did you know? Fernando de Noronha's islands are the visible peaks of a submerged volcanic mountain range, which explains the dark rock framing the bay.
06 Church of Saint Francis of Assisi (Ouro Preto)
Igreja de São Francisco de Assis (Ouro Preto)
Brazil20.387° S 43.503° W
Sarah and Iain · CC BY 2.0 Of all the churches of Ouro Preto, the old gold capital of Minas Gerais, the church of Saint Francis of Assisi is the one most closely tied to a single genius.
Did you know? Aleijadinho personally carved the two soapstone pulpits that flank the great arch between the nave and the chancel.
07 Gruta do Lago Azul
Monumento Natural da Gruta do Lago Azul
Brazil21.145° S 56.592° W
Luiz Felipe Sahd · CC BY-SA 3.0 Gruta do Lago Azul, the Blue Lake Cave, opens in the limestone hills outside Bonito in Brazil's Mato Grosso do Sul as a wide mouth in the forest, about 40 metres across.
Did you know? Beyond sabre-toothed cats and giant sloths, the Ice Age bones from the lake floor include armadillos, llamas and primitive horses about 12,000 years old.
08 Aparados da Serra National Park
Parque Nacional de Aparados da Serra
Brazil29.192° S 50.098° W
Image by InaeMiranda from Pixabay Aparados da Serra National Park protects the edge of the great southern Brazilian plateau at the point where it simply stops.
Did you know? The hard basalt erodes extraordinarily slowly, at an estimated 6 metres per million years on the plateau and up to 50 metres on the escarpment.
09 Christ the Redeemer
Cristo Redentor
Brazil · 4.9 km from Rio de Janeiro22.952° S 43.210° W
Image by FlaviaPadula from Pixabay The statue is as much a French project as a Brazilian one.
Did you know? Building it cost the equivalent of about US$250,000 at the time.
10 Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden
Jardim Botânico do Rio de Janeiro
Brazil · 6.8 km from Rio de Janeiro22.968° S 43.224° W
Image by anapaulafelic from Pixabay The garden began as a royal experiment. In 1808, soon after the Portuguese court fled Napoleon's armies and settled in Rio, the prince regent João, later King John VI, founded it as a place to acclimatise spices and other useful plants brought from the East Indies.
Did you know? The herbarium held some 600,000 dried specimens in 2014 and was adding about 20,000 more each year.
11 Museum of Tomorrow
Museu do Amanhã
Brazil · 3.7 km from Rio de Janeiro22.894° S 43.179° W
Image by LyraSid from Pixabay The Museum of Tomorrow stands at the end of Pier Mauá in Rio de Janeiro, reaching out into Guanabara Bay like a skeleton of white steel. It was designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, who said he drew inspiration from the bromeliads of Rio's botanical garden, and it opened on 17 December 2015.
Did you know? Calatrava's building earned LEED Gold certification, and in 2017 it won the MIPIM Award for Best Innovative Green Building for its solar fins and bay-water cooling.
12 Sugarloaf Cable Car
Bondinho do Pão de Açúcar
Brazil · 7.1 km from Rio de Janeiro22.956° S 43.167° W
Image by nuno_lopes from Pixabay The Sugarloaf Cable Car lifts visitors in two stages from the shore at Praia Vermelha to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain, the granite dome that guards the entrance to Guanabara Bay.
Did you know? On the upper section the cabins reach about 10 metres per second, or 36 km/h, while the lower section runs at up to 6 metres per second.
13 Amazon rainforest
Floresta amazônica
Brazil · 7.5 km from Manaus3.160° S 60.030° W
Lula Oficial · CC BY-SA 4.0 Manaus sits at a junction that looks wrong even once you know why it happens.
Did you know? Water in the western basin once flowed toward the Pacific; only within the last 5 to 10 million years did it break through to drain east into the Atlantic.
14 Amazon Theatre
Teatro Amazonas
Brazil · 4.3 km from Manaus3.130° S 60.023° W
Karine Hermes · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Amazon Theatre is the most eloquent relic of the years when rubber made Manaus, a river port in the middle of the rainforest, one of the richest cities in Brazil.
Did you know? The great central chandelier of the auditorium can be lowered all the way down to seat level for cleaning and maintenance.
15 São Bento Monastery, Rio de Janeiro
Mosteiro de São Bento
Brazil · 3.7 km from Rio de Janeiro22.897° S 43.178° W
Halley Pacheco de Oliveira · CC BY-SA 3.0 Benedictine monks arriving from Bahia founded the monastery on a hill above Rio's harbor in 1590. Construction of the church that stands today began in 1633 and was finished in 1671, with an additional annex completed in 1755 — a building campaign that stretched across more than a century.
Did you know? The stone for the building was quarried at Morro da Viúva, in what is now Rio's Flamengo district.
16 São Miguel das Missões
Brazil · 38.6 km from Santo Ângelo28.549° S 54.556° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Vini Araujo Landscapher Photographer · CC BY-SA 4.0 A tall stone façade stands alone on a grassy plain in the far south of Brazil, its arched portal and single bell tower glowing reddish in the late sun.
Did you know? The pilasters of the seven-arched portico swell slightly in the middle, a refinement meant to correct the optical illusion of straight columns looking thin.
17 Juscelino Kubitschek bridge
Ponte Juscelino Kubitschek
Brazil · 10.6 km from Brasília15.824° S 47.829° W
Image by Victor000 from Pixabay Three white steel arches leap across Lake Paranoá in Brasília, each crossing the roadway diagonally so that together they look like a stone skipping over the water. The Juscelino Kubitschek Bridge, opened in December 2002, gave the capital of Brazil a new crossing and a new landmark on the water.
Did you know? The four main foundation blocks each measure about 23 by 30 metres and sit just below the surface of the lake.
18 Cathedral of Brasília
Catedral Metropolitana de Brasília
Brazil · 4.9 km from Brasília15.798° S 47.876° W
Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz) · CC BY-SA 4.0 Oscar Niemeyer's cathedral for Brasília is hardly a building in the ordinary sense — more a crown of sixteen curved concrete ribs rising from a round base and gathering at the waist before flaring open again against the sky.
Did you know? The altar was a gift from Pope Paul VI, and the Stations of the Cross are the work of the modernist painter Emiliano Di Cavalcanti.
19 Corcovado
Brazil · 5 km from Rio de Janeiro22.953° S 43.212° W
Image by guertzen from Pixabay Corcovado, "the hunchback", is a 710-metre granite peak rising abruptly from the middle of Rio de Janeiro, entirely inside the city yet wrapped in the rainforest of Tijuca National Park.
Did you know? A Vincentian priest, Pedro Maria Boss, first proposed a Christian monument on the peak in the 1850s to honour Princess Isabel, but it was never approved.
20 São Francisco Church and Convent, Salvador
Igreja e Convento de São Francisco
Brazil · 3 km from Salvador12.975° S 38.509° W
Wellington Da Costa Gomez · CC BY-SA 4.0 Salvador, Brazil's first colonial capital, is a city of churches, and São Francisco is the one where the Portuguese idea of the igreja dourada, the "golden church", is carried to its limit.
Did you know? Two holy water fonts in the nave are carved from reddish Arrábida breccia, a variegated Portuguese limestone, and were a gift from King John V.
21 Meeting of Waters (Manaus)
Encontro das Águas
Brazil · 11.6 km from Manaus3.137° S 59.905° W
Ana Claudia Jatahy - MTUR · CC0 Just downstream from Manaus, two of the great rivers of the Amazon basin meet and, for a few kilometres, refuse to become one. The Rio Negro arrives nearly black, the colour of strong tea, stained by decayed leaves and plant matter from the forests it drains and carrying almost no sediment.
Did you know? Despite its enormous flow, the Rio Negro carries only about 5.8 million tonnes of sediment a year past Manaus, which is why it stays so dark and clear.
22 Church of Saint Francis of Assisi (Pampulha)
Igreja São Francisco de Assis
Brazil · 8.9 km from Belo Horizonte19.858° S 43.979° W
Bernardo Gouvêa · CC BY-SA 3.0 Four rolling concrete vaults, set beside an artificial lake, make the little church of Saint Francis of Assisi in Pampulha one of the founding works of Brazilian modern architecture.
Did you know? When demolition failed, the chapel was cluttered with altars and monuments in clashing styles until the heritage service took charge and Niemeyer refurbished it.
23 Escadaria Selarón
Brazil · 3.5 km from Rio de Janeiro22.915° S 43.179° W
Donatas Dabravolskas · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Escadaria Selarón is a public stairway turned into one man's life work. It climbs 215 steps and about 125 metres from the Rua Joaquim Silva in Lapa up towards the Santa Teresa hill in central Rio de Janeiro, and every riser, wall and landing is covered in fragments of tile, ceramic and mirror.
Did you know? Selarón was born in 1947 in Limache, Chile, and had lived and worked in more than fifty countries before he arrived in Rio.
24 Pedra Furada
Brazil8.833° S 42.553° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Thiagomarcelcampi · CC BY-SA 4.0 Pedra Furada, "the pierced rock", takes its name from a stone arch in the hills of southeastern Piauí, but its fame comes from the great rock shelter beneath the cliffs of the Boqueirão da Pedra Furada.
Did you know? Guidon first heard of the Piauí paintings in 1963, when a visiting mayor showed her photographs, but she could not reach the region until 1973.
25 Sanctuary of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos
Santuário do Bom Jesus de Matosinhos
Brazil · 19.4 km from Conselheiro Lafaiete20.508° S 43.861° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by bea_marques from Pixabay The Sanctuary of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos crowns a hill above the old mining town of Congonhas in Minas Gerais, and it holds the most important body of work by the Brazilian sculptor and architect known as Aleijadinho.
Did you know? Each September, from the 8th to the 14th, the sanctuary hosts a Jubilee granted by Pope Pius VI in 1779; over 100,000 pilgrims were counted in 2005.
26 Ingá Stone
Pedra do Ingá
Brazil · 34.2 km from Campina Grande7.325° S 35.585° W
Image by IgorSuassuna from Pixabay The Ingá Stone — Pedra do Ingá, or Itacoatiara do Ingá, from the Tupi for "painted" or "scratched stone" — is a long outcrop of gneiss lying in the bed of the Ingá river in the interior of Paraíba, north-eastern Brazil, and it carries one of the most remarkable sets of rock carvings in South America.
Did you know? Signs on the top of the rock are shallower and less carefully made than those on the wall below, and scattered rough scratchings elsewhere still puzzle researchers.
27 Cachoeira da Fumaça
Brazil12.601° S 41.455° W
r m · CC BY 2.0 Cachoeira da Fumaça, "Smoke Falls", drops about 340 metres from the edge of the highlands of the Chapada Diamantina of Bahia, Brazil. For most of the year the falls hardly reach the ground at all. The stream at the lip is thin, and over such a height the wind tears it into spray long before it reaches the bottom.
Did you know? The region's name joins chapada, a cliff-edged plateau, with Diamantina, after the diamonds found in these hills in the mid-19th century.
28 Vale da Lua
Brazil14.187° S 47.790° W
Cristiamara Giordani · CC BY-SA 4.0 In the highlands of Goiás in central Brazil, the São Miguel river runs through a stretch of bare grey rock so pitted, scooped and rippled that it looks less like a riverbed than the surface of another world.
Did you know? The national park was founded in 1961 by President Juscelino Kubitschek as Tocantins National Park and took its current name in 1972.
29 Cashew Tree of Pirangi
Brazil · 25 km from Natal5.974° S 35.129° W
Jorge Savignon Jorrin · CC BY-SA 4.0 The cashew tree of Pirangi looks less like a single tree than a small forest.
Did you know? In 1955 the Brazilian magazine O Cruzeiro christened the tree O Polvo, the Octopus, when its canopy covered only about 2,000 square metres.
30 Sítio Roberto Burle Marx
Brazil · 31.5 km from Nova Iguaçu23.024° S 43.545° W
Halley Pacheco de Oliveira · CC BY-SA 3.0 Ranks of bromeliads, philodendrons and palms collected from across Brazil's forests grow at the foot of a forested hill on the western edge of Rio de Janeiro, arranged with a painter's eye for colour and mass.
Did you know? Burle Marx is said to have started collecting plants at the age of six, decades before he bought the estate.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Brazil?
- On our list, Lençóis Maranhenses National Park ranks first, followed by Iguaçu Falls and Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading.
- How tall is Christ the Redeemer?
- The statue is about 30 metres tall, standing on a pedestal of about 8 metres, and its arms span roughly 28 metres. It was completed in 1931 on the summit of Corcovado.
- Why do lagoons appear between the dunes of Lençóis Maranhenses?
- Heavy rains in the first half of the year collect in the hollows between the dunes, held up by a layer of impermeable rock beneath the sand. The lagoons shrink and many vanish in the dry season.
- Why was the Amazon Theatre built in the middle of the rainforest?
- Manaus grew rich during the rubber boom of the late nineteenth century, and its elite built an opera house to rival Europe's. The theatre opened in 1896 with materials largely shipped from Europe.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Brazil?
- In our collection, the places in Brazil are most often churches (6), waterfalls (3), mountains (2) and caves (2).
- How many places are on this list in Brazil?
- The list covers 44 places.