Tourism is a growing industry in Brazil, which receives some three million foreign visitors a year. However, Brazilians visiting abroad spend significantly more money than do foreigners visiting Brazil; among Brazilians’ preferred destinations are Uruguay, Argentina, and the United States. Most tourists in Brazil travel to Rio de Janeiro and other easily accessible sites that are in or around urban centres with well-established hospitality industries. Salvador and other parts of Bahia are major tourist attractions, and increasing numbers of vacationers are visiting other coastal areas of the Northeast. Eco-tourism is moderately popular in the Amazon region, while in the South the beaches of Santa Catarina draw large crowds of Argentine tourists. The spectacular Iguaçu Falls, which are now connected to major urban centres by highways and air routes, annually attract more than one million foreign and domestic tourists. Pristine beaches in the Northeast, national parks in the interior, and historic sites throughout Brazil are garnering increasing interest. In the 1980s the cities Ouro Prêto, Olinda, Salvador, and Brasília were designated World Heritage sites, as were portions of the Northeast coast in 1999.

The larger Brazilian cities have a wide range of accommodations, but most luxury hotels are in Rio de Janeiro, and there are some large spas, hotels, and resorts in the Minas Gerais highlands and at Iguaçu Falls. Hotel construction has boomed in the cities of the Northeast and South. A growing number of Brazilians travel throughout the country by automobile and aircraft during vacations.

Roads

Roads account for the vast majority of passenger traffic and roughly two-thirds of freight tonnage hauled. The country had few good paved roads at the time Brasília was constructed in the late 1950s. A four-lane highway linked Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, but there were no paved roads from those cities to Pôrto Alegre, Curitiba, the Northeast, or west of Belo Horizonte. During the rainy season some roads could be flooded or blocked for a week or more at a time, stranding motorists in areas with limited housing and food supplies.

The construction of Brasília, for which many bulky materials had to be airlifted in during the rainy season, alerted the country to the poor state of its roads, and when the military assumed power in 1964 it made the upgrading of the road system a primary objective. As a result, a comprehensive system of paved highways now connects all of the major points in Brazil, including several cities in the Amazon region; paved roads account for about one-tenth of the Brazilian road system. Among the more prominent arteries are the Trans-Amazonian Highway and the Trans-Brasiliana project. Given Brazil’s vast extent, these and other highways are extremely long and difficult to maintain, especially in the Amazon region.

Railways

Railroads are of little importance to Brazil’s transportation network except for certain bulk ore carriers and the commuter lines to the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Brasília. In contrast to Brazil’s dynamic highway construction program, few new railways of any significance have been built in the country since World War II, when Rio de Janeiro was linked by rail to Salvador because of attacks by German submarines on coastal shipping. The modest construction since that time has included a branch line from Minas Gerais to Brasília, the ore-carrying line (opened in 1985) between the Carajás mining project and Pôrto do Itaqui (near São Luis), and the Ferronorte line, which carries bulk agricultural products between Alto Taquari and the Alto Paraná River in the Central-West. Brasília’s metropolitan rail system, linking the capital with its suburbs, inaugurated its first section in 1994 and expanded rapidly thereafter. The federal government sold off its controlling shares of railways in 1997, but many states and cities retain control of local lines.