Brazil

Brazil was home to millions of Indigenous people — Tupi, Guarani, Gê, and hundreds of others, with around 250 groups and some 150 languages surviving today, mostly in Amazonia. Claimed for Portugal in 1500, it developed through cycles of extraction: brazilwood, which gave the country its name, then sugar in the northeast, a gold rush in Minas Gerais, rubber in Amazonia, and coffee in the southeast.

Brazil imported far more enslaved Africans than anywhere else in the Americas — an estimated four to five million — and was the last country in the Western world to abolish slavery, in 1888. Independence came almost bloodlessly in 1822 as a monarchy under a son of the Portuguese king; a republican coup followed in 1889.

The twentieth century brought the populist Vargas era, rapid industrialisation, the building of Brasília, and a military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. Since the return to democracy, hyperinflation was tamed by the 1994 Real Plan, tens of millions were lifted out of poverty during the commodity boom, and politics has grown sharply polarised — the leftist Lula returned to the presidency in 2023 after beating the incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, whose supporters then stormed government buildings in Brasília.

Brazil sees itself as a mixed society — Indigenous, African, Portuguese, and later Italian, German, Japanese, Lebanese, and more — though race and inequality remain deep, unresolved themes. Football is close to a national religion, with a record five World Cups and a pantheon from Pelé to Neymar.

Music is a vast inheritance: samba, born in Rio's Afro-Brazilian communities; bossa nova; the Bahian axé and Afro-blocos; forró in the northeast; and today's dominant sertanejo and funk carioca. Carnival, in the days before Lent, is celebrated nationwide — the Rio Sambadrome parade, the street blocos of Rio and São Paulo, and Salvador's sound-truck parties are the best known.

Afro-Brazilian religions such as Candomblé, especially in Bahia, coexist with a fast-growing evangelical movement that is reshaping society and politics. Capoeira, the martial-art-dance developed by enslaved Africans, and a strong literary and film tradition round out the picture, along with an easy physical warmth and the "jeitinho," the knack of finding a way around obstacles.

About a third of Brazilians live in the southeast, in and around São Paulo — the economic engine and one of the world's largest metros — and Rio de Janeiro, the former capital and the country's tourist face. The modernist capital, Brasília, was carved out of the central plateau and inaugurated in 1960 to pull development inland.

Beyond the cities are the Amazon and Pantanal, the drought-prone sertão of the northeast, the agribusiness frontier of the centre-west, and a long Atlantic coastline where beach life is its own social world. Inequality is stark and visible, with gated apartment blocks beside self-built favelas in the same neighbourhoods.

Card payment and the instant Pix transfer system have made much of daily life nearly cashless. Life runs late, especially around Carnival and in the northeast, and football, church, and the extended family anchor the week.

Brazilian cooking is regional. The national dish is feijoada, a rich black-bean stew with cuts of pork, served with rice, collard greens, toasted cassava flour, and orange — traditionally a weekend lunch. Everyday meals pair rice and beans with a grilled or stewed protein. The southern churrasco, skewered salt-crusted meats carved at the table, became the global "rodízio" steakhouse.

Bahia's Afro-Brazilian kitchen uses palm oil, coconut milk, and dried shrimp in moqueca fish stew and acarajé fritters. Minas Gerais is known for pão de queijo cheese bread and pork dishes; the Amazon for freshwater fish, the tongue-numbing jambu herb, and savoury açaí eaten cold as a staple.

Fruit is spectacular and often unfamiliar — cupuaçu, graviola, jabuticaba, cajá. The national cocktail is the caipirinha, made with cane spirit, lime, and sugar, and small strong sweet coffees punctuate the day.

Rio de Janeiro is the classic introduction: Christ the Redeemer atop Corcovado, the cable car up Sugarloaf over Guanabara Bay, the beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema, the Selarón Steps, and the bohemian nightlife of Lapa and Santa Teresa, all wrapped in the replanted Tijuca Forest. Iguaçu Falls, on the Argentine border, is a 2.7-kilometre arc of cascades, with the Brazilian side giving the panorama.

The Amazon is usually seen from Manaus — the "Meeting of the Waters," jungle lodges, and a Belle Époque opera house — or from Belém at the river's mouth. The Pantanal, in the west, is the best place in South America to see wildlife, including wild jaguars along its rivers, plus caiman, capybara, giant otters, and hyacinth macaws.

Salvador da Bahia has the colourful Pelourinho old town and the heart of Afro-Brazilian culture; Ouro Preto and the Minas Gerais gold towns have Baroque churches and the sculpture of Aleijadinho. The northeast adds the dunes and lagoons of the Lençóis Maranhenses and the protected archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, and Brasília offers Niemeyer's architecture on a monumental scale.