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Travel and Tourism in Brazil
Travel alerts, currency, climate, transit, health, and safety information for visitors to Brazil.
Practical Information
Travel alert status, currency, climate, and transit details.
- Travel Alert Status
- Level 2: Exercise Increased Caution
- Time Difference
- UTC-3 (2 hours ahead of Washington, DC, during Standard Time) time zone note: Brazil has four time zones, including one for the Fernando de Noronha Islands
- Currency
- 3.483
- Climate
- Although Brazil is immense in size and varies in topography from the sweeping sea-level Amazon basin in the north to the mountainous areas of São Paulo and Porto Alegre in the south, the temperature range is slight. Summer runs from December to February. The rainy season runs from October to March but varies greatly by region.
- Language(s) Spoken
- Portuguese (official and most widely spoken language); note - less common languages include Spanish (border areas and schools), German, Italian, Japanese, English, and a large number of minor Amerindian languages
- Ethnic Groups
- mixed 45.3%, White 43.5%, Black 10.2%, Indigenous 0.6%, Asian 0.4%
- National Holiday
- Independence Day, 7 September (1822)
- Geographic Coordinates
- 10 00 S, 55 00 W
- Location
- Eastern South America, bordering the Atlantic Ocean
- Airports
- 4,105
Destinations
Regions and cities, top sights, national parks, UNESCO sites, and festivals for visitors.
The Amazon Region
The Amazon is the largest river system on earth by discharge volume, carrying approximately 20 percent of all fresh water that flows into the world's oceans. Its main channel, which stretches over 6,400 kilometers from its headwaters in the Peruvian Andes to its mouth near Belém in Brazil, is navigable by ocean-going vessels for over 3,500 kilometers. The river basin it drains covers approximately 7 million square kilometers — an area larger than the contiguous United States — and the forest that covers most of this basin is the most biodiverse terrestrial ecosystem on the planet, estimated to contain approximately 390 billion individual trees representing some 16,000 species, along with millions of species of insects, an estimated 3,000 species of freshwater fish, and thousands of species of birds, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles.
Manaus, a city of over two million people deep in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, is the primary gateway for most visitors to the Brazilian Amazon. The city's existence in the middle of the jungle was made possible — and made impossibly grand — by the rubber boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the Amazon's wild rubber trees made Manaus one of the wealthiest cities in the world.
Health and Safety
Medical facilities, vaccinations, disease risk, and sanitation conditions.
Medical care is generally good but it varies in quality, particularly in remote areas, and it may not meet U.S. standards outside the major cities. Prescription and over-the-counter medicines are widely available. Emergency services are responsive. Travelers may call a private ambulance company or call 192 and request an ambulance for a public hospital. Callers must stay on the line to provide the location as there is no automatic tracking of phone calls.