Compared to its neighbors of Colombia, Peru, Chile, and Argentina, Brazil sees only a modest number of Western visitors who come bicycle touring through the country. Although this was not my first time in Brazil, and I’ve seen much of the country already, for all these years and for no particular reason, somehow I’ve largely avoided to visit the southern region of Brazil. I had never given the region a miss because of, for example, safety concerns or a lack of appealing destinations, but simply because I just hadn’t gotten around to include it in one of my past itineraries or come down there as my sole purpose, whether to visit a particular coastal area or one in the interior.
One of those destinations deep in the interior, however, that, despite my having been for many years in the travel business and having sent there many clients in the past, eluded me, were the Iguazu Falls, a site of exceptional beauty and ecological significance. Finally, last summer at last, I planned a trip to the Iguazu Falls, although not as a sole destination in its own right. I picked it as a cycling destination of a tour I conceived would begin in Florianopolis on the east coast of Brazil.
Long aware of Florianopolis, the capital of the state of Santa Catarina, being hailed as Brazil’s slice of Europe on account of its European immigrants who comprise nearly 80% of total population, and also a party destination aside being labeled one of the ten most dynamic cities of the world, I have considered visiting it before. Even though the last two labels Florianopolis received almost 20 years ago, these assessments gave Florianopolis a definite allure. Although still considered by Brazilians as one of the best places where to live and retire in Brazil, Florianopolis is also one of the safest cites in the country, and that is indeed one of its strong points. The appraisal of being one of the most desirable places where to live in Brazil largely stems from having the country’s third highest Human Development Index score among all Brazilian cities, a statistical composite index of life expectancy, years of completed education, and per capita income.
To me, as a cyclist, of primary interest in Florianopolis were the wooded hills, the island’s many bays and lagoons, and some 40 sandy beaches, all of which promised cycling in an appealing environment. And so this past September, I packed my bicycle and finally flew down there.
Despite selecting Florianopolis as only the starting point of my cycling tour, I planned to ride a week around the Santa Catarina island before setting out west toward Iguazu. Though at the back of my mind was the terrain and distance of well over 1,000 kilometers that I had to cover if I hoped to reach Iguazu, I first planned to cross the Serra do Mar, the coastal range, and explore the mountains on the other side during my second week.
Though topography and nature always make up the primary appeal of any destination, history and culture, architecture and man-made attributes of any place reign near my affinity for selecting particular cycling destinations just as well. Although the Portuguese landed on the Florianopolis island as early as the beginning of the 16th century, the first permanent settlement didn’t follow until the late 17th century. Interestingly enough, the influx of the first Portuguese settlers came from the Azores, hence the earliest architecture around the Ilha Santa Catarina carries the architectural style of the Azores Islands (church image below in Ribeirão da Ilha.) German immigrants came in the mid-19th century, followed by the Italians in the late 1800s, and more European immigrants arrived after WWI and WWII.
Portuguese colonial architecture always interested me. Last time I traveled in the footsteps of the Portuguese was in India, cycling Mumbai to Diu, and time before that cycling Mysore to Ft. Kochi.
Planning a cycling route from Florianópolis to Iguazu Falls proved challenging. Komoot offered little in the way of route data, while RideWithGPS and Strava too had only a few GPS tracks I could find in their database. Brazilian cyclists prefer Wikiloc. After studying maps and consulting with friends and contacts in Brazil, I eventually chose a route that looked promising.
However, as my expected departure approached, the weather took a turn; the forecast called for persistent rain for almost the entire week ahead. And so, instead of crossing the Serra do Mar and exploring the mountains beyond and heading toward Iguazu, the imminent dreadful weather forced me to adapt Plan B.
After my initial week of day rides from my base in Floripa, as Florianópolis is commonly known, I needed to check out from my Airbnb studio. Unable to ride west to the mainland, I set out cycling south from Floripa. Set to ride until the rain starts, I continued to the east, where the rain finally forced me to halt and take a break until the weather would change again.
I survived the rain in Lagoa da Conceição, a popular lagoon-side neighborhood in the east-central part of Ilha de Santa Catarina. The heavy non-stop rain lasted five days, just as predicted. During this downtime, I bought a plane ticket to Foz do Iguaçu, timing the departure for the end of the rain forecast. This allowed me not only to ride back to Florianópolis, but also complete a full 360 degree circle of the island.
In retrospect, having given up on a 1,000km-long bicycle tour from Florianopolis to Iguazu, and even an outing across the Serra, at least I cycled around the entire Santa Catarina island and I made it to Iguazu, where I then spent a week and a half exploring the magnificent waterfalls in the tri-country border area of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. The natural beauty of Iguazu Falls, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, stole the show of my entire trip, leaving an unforgettable impression on me, hence I will need to come back to it in another post. That said, undeniably, my planned tour cycling from Florianopolis to Iguazu will have to wait for another trip to Brazil.
