Brazilian cities, found on the map

Every one on the map

Every place listed below can be asked in this game. Places you find in a passed round drop out of your remaining pool. Grouped into 5 learning regions, matching the rounds on the Brazil guide. Regions with no places in this map’s selection are omitted.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 17 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

São Paulo

About 12 million people in the city and 22 million in the metropolitan area, which makes it the largest urban area in the southern hemisphere. Jesuits founded it in 1554 on a plateau 70km from the sea, and it stayed a small town until coffee arrived in the nineteenth century, then grew by roughly a hundredfold in a hundred years.

Rio de Janeiro

The capital of Brazil for nearly two centuries and the country’s image abroad ever since. The name means January river, from a bay the Portuguese mistook for a river mouth on 1 January 1502. The statue on Corcovado went up in 1931, and the city is the only one to have hosted both a World Cup final and the Olympic Games in the same decade.

Brasília

A capital built where nothing was, on the argument that a country facing the sea would never develop its interior. Ground was broken in 1956 and the government moved in on 21 April 1960. The plan has no street names in the usual sense: addresses are a sector, a block and a building, which residents can read and visitors cannot.

Salvador

The first capital of Brazil, from 1549 to 1763, and the port through which most of the enslaved Africans brought to Brazil arrived. What came with them stayed: candomblé, capoeira, the food and the drums. The old city is split into an upper and a lower town joined by an elevator built in 1873.

Fortaleza

Around 2.7 million people on a beach at the corner of the continent, and one of the most densely built cities in Brazil. The jangada, a raft of six logs with a sail and no keel, is still fished from the beaches either side of it, and crews used to sail them hundreds of kilometers along the coast.

Belo Horizonte

The first planned city in Brazil, laid out on a grid with diagonals in 1897 to replace the old colonial capital of Minas Gerais. Its Pampulha district, built in 1943, is where Oscar Niemeyer first worked in curves, and the church he put there was refused consecration for fourteen years because the bishop thought it looked wrong.

Manaus

Two million people 1,500km up the Amazon, reachable by road from one direction only. The rubber boom paid for an opera house in 1896 with Italian marble and Alsatian tiles shipped up the river, and the free-trade zone created in 1967 is why most televisions and motorcycles sold in Brazil are assembled in the middle of the rainforest.

Recife

Built on islands and peninsulas between two rivers and the sea, with enough bridges that it gets called the Brazilian Venice. The reef it is named for shelters the harbor. It was the Dutch capital of Brazil from 1630, and the synagogue on its old street is the oldest in the Americas.

Curitiba

On a plateau at 930 meters, cold enough that it is the one Brazilian city where people complain about winter. In 1974 it put articulated buses in dedicated lanes with tube stations and prepaid boarding, invented bus rapid transit in the process, and became the example every city with no money for a metro now follows.

Porto Alegre

The capital of the gaúcho south, where five rivers meet in a body of water most locals call a lake and hydrologists call a delta. In May 2024 the whole system rose after two weeks of rain and flooded much of the city, including the airport, which closed for months.

Belém

The gateway to the Amazon since 1616, at the point where the river system meets the Atlantic. Its Ver-o-Peso market has been trading fish, açaí and forest medicine on the waterfront for over three centuries, and the city held the UN climate conference in 2025, which is the first time that meeting was held inside the basin it spends its time discussing.

Goiânia

Laid out in 1933 with radial avenues to replace a colonial town that had run out of room, and it now has over 1.5 million people. It is the center of Brazilian country music, sertanejo, which sells more records here than anything else in the country does anywhere.

São Luís

Founded by a French expedition in 1612 and named for their king, then taken by the Portuguese three years later, which makes it the only state capital in Brazil the French started. Its old center has thousands of buildings faced in Portuguese tiles, put there to keep the damp out, and it is on the UNESCO list for them.

Natal

Founded on Christmas Day 1599, which is where the name comes from. In the Second World War the Americans built an airfield here that became the busiest military air base outside their own territory, ferrying aircraft across the narrowest part of the Atlantic to North Africa; it was called the trampoline to victory.

Florianópolis

Mostly on an island of 42 beaches, joined to the mainland by a suspension bridge from 1926 that was the longest in Brazil when it opened. Azorean settlers arrived in the 1750s and their descendants still fish the bays, and the city has since become the country’s main software cluster outside São Paulo.

Cuiabá

A gold town from the 1720s that turned out to sit close to the geographic center of South America, and there is a monument in it saying so. It is one of the hottest cities in Brazil, regularly over 40 degrees, and it is the road gateway to the Pantanal a few hours south.

Macapá

The equator runs through the city, and a monument called Marco Zero stands on the line with a football stadium beside it whose halfway line is the equator too, so each team defends a hemisphere. There is no road from here to the rest of Brazil.

How this one works

The other maps of Brazil

Sweden has the same map in Swedish cities. Denmark has the same map in Danish cities. India has the same map in Indian cities. Mexico has the same map in Mexican cities. United States has the same map in American cities. China has the same map in Chinese cities. Turkey has the same map in Turkish cities. France has the same map in French cities. Japan has the same map in Japanese cities. Germany has the same map in German cities. Spain has the same map in Spanish cities. United Kingdom has the same map in British cities. Italy has the same map in Italian cities. South Korea has the same map in Korean cities. All three together on the Brazil atlas page, the country itself on the Brazil guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.