Top 20+ Little-Known Facts About Brazil

Liz April 24, 2023 | 18:17

Brazil is a charismatic place, and there are tons of reasons to visit it. If you are an independent traveler looking for the next best destination, this list of Brazil facts will blow your mind!

30 amazing facts about Brazil, home to a hidden mountain and a ghost town in the jungle

People in Brazil. Photo: Time Magazine

Many people picture a very long flight when they think of Brazil as a potential travel destination. It's exciting, alluring, and worth so much more than it costs to get there.

Looking for Brazil-related information? If you think you know everything there is to know about Brazil, here are 23 things you're wrong about!

1. Brazil has seen a rise in the number of bars with Osama Bin Laden decor. Well, there are at least a couple. The "Bin Laden's Cave" Caverna do Bin Laden, which is located in Niteroi, about 25 kilometers north of Rio de Janeiro, and the Bar do Bin Laden in Sao Paulo, both run by lookalikes of Osama bin Laden.

2. Some 1.5 million-2.5 million Brazilians are of Japanese descent. Many immigrants brought with them seedlings of cherry trees and cherry blossoms can be viewed outside homes in Sao Paulo, and in public parks in Curitiba.

3. Dolphins can assist fishermen in Laguna, Brazil's southeast, in catching their dinner. Fish will be herded towards waiting nets by the animals, who may even flick their heads to signal the setting of the trap. The fishermen claim that although the practice dates back many generations, Western media has only recently made mention of it.

4. The country’s motto is “Ordem e Progresso”, meaning “order and progress”.

5. São Vicente, near Sao Paulo, is the oldest city in Brazil and was Portugal’s first permanent settlement in the Americas. Established in 1532, it is the birthplace of footballer Robinho.

6. The Pico da Neblina (Mist Peak), which is located on the border with Venezuela and rises 2,994 meters (9,823 feet) above sea level, is the highest mountain in Brazil. It took until the 1950s for it to be discovered, and it took until 1965—12 years after Everest—for the first ascent—due to the fact that it was almost perpetually shrouded in clouds.

7. Brasilia, the country’s capital, took just 41 months to build, from 1956 to 1960 (Rio had been the capital for the previous 197 years).

8. Brasilia looks like an airplane from above.

9. More tribes are thought to exist in Brazil's Amazon than anywhere else in the world, according to estimates. According to Udrive, the government's FUNAI department has verified the existence of 67 remote tribes that are cut off from the outside world.

10. After the Second World War, a number of Nazis, including Josef Mengele (the "Angel of Death"), who was notorious for his cruel experiments and obsession with twins, emigrated to Brazil. He has been blamed (but not proven) for the high twin birth rate in the town of Cândido Godói, close to the Argentine border.

11. Brazil has been the world’s largest exporter of coffee for more than 150 years. It supplied around 80 percent of the world’s coffee in the 1920s; that figure has fallen to around a third.

12. Recent years have seen a rise in interest in tours of Brazil's shantytowns, or "favelas". One of the most well-known is Rio de Janeiro's vibrant Santa Marta, which has drawn celebrities like Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Beyonce.

13. Some of the worst traffic jams in the world occur in Sao Paulo. The city's traffic management organization, Companhia de Engenharia de Tráfego, claims that on November 15, 2013, a congestion record was set with a total of 309 kilometers (192 mi) of queues around the city during the evening rush hour.

14.There are 21 UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Brazil. The Iguacu National Park, which has one of the largest and most impressive waterfalls in the world with a width of 1.7 miles and a total of 275 drops, is among the most well-known. The giant otter and the giant anteater are just two of the rare and endangered species that live there. The Pampulha Modern Ensemble, an Oscar Niemeyer garden city project, and the Valongo Wharf Archaeological Site are two of the most recent additions. Both were inscribed by Unesco in 2016 and 2017.

15.By amount of water discharged, the Amazon River is the biggest river in the world. Approximately 209,000 cubic meters per second flow into the Atlantic Ocean, which is more than the combined volume of the following seven largest rivers and is sufficient to fill Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world, in less than four years. The river can be up to 30 miles wide during the rainy season.

16. The most popular surname in Brazil is Silva.

17. The statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro weighs 635 tonnes, is 38 meters high including its pedestal and was named one of the “New Seven Wonders of the World” in 2007. It was damaged by a lightning strike in 2014.

18. Brazil has more than 4,000 airports – more than any other country other than the US (which has a remarkable 13,513).

Top 23 Facts about Brazils You (Probably) Didn't Know

One of Brazil's Airports. Photo: Only Private Jets

19. Some 1.5 million-2.5 million Brazilians are of Japanese descent.Many immigrants brought cherry tree seedlings, and in Curitiba and Sao Paulo, you can see cherry blossoms outside of homes and in public parks.

20. Around 6.4 million tourists visit Brazil each year, one of the fewest of any country in the world as a percentage of its total population. Half of them head to Rio.

21. The world’s largest open-air garbage dump, Jardim Gramacho, was once found in the Brazilian city of Duque de Caxias. It closed in 2012.

22. Brazil is one of the world’s most bioperse countries, with a total of four million plant and animal species, according to estimates. It has more species of monkeys than any other nation.

23. Henry Ford spent huge amounts of money trying to create rubber plantations and factories in the middle of the Amazon jungle. On the banks of the Tapajos river, a town modeled after the American Midwest and modestly known as Fordlandia grew. There are still traces of his ultimately crushed dream. It takes some work to reach this industrial ghost town, but it is worthwhile.

There’s a Brazilian island where the largest population are snakes

Humans do not live on the Snake Island, also known as Ilha Queimada Grande. The island is actually so dangerous that people aren't even allowed to travel there.

Golden lancehead snakes are thought to inhabit the island in densities of one snake per square meter. Although there are snakes of this kind on the mainland as well, they are not nearly as venomous as their island relatives.