South Region, Brazil

The South Region of Brazil is the country’s smallest, covering 576,409.6 square kilometers—less than the state of Minas Gerais or all of metropolitan France, and just 6.76% of Brazil’s territory. It includes the states of Paraná, Rio Grande do Sul, and Santa Catarina, and shares borders with Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, the Centre-West and Southeast regions, and the Atlantic Ocean. The region is a tourist, economic, and cultural hub, and is considered the safest in Brazil for visitors due to its lower crime rate.

Before Europeans arrived, semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer native tribes lived across the area. Portuguese and Spanish Jesuit missionaries were the first Europeans to settle, converting indigenous peoples to Catholicism, while bandeirantes from São Paulo also arrived. Disputes between the Portuguese and Spanish crowns led the King of Portugal to encourage Azorean immigration: between 1748 and 1756, six thousand Azoreans came, making up over half the population of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina by the late 1700s.

After Brazil’s independence in 1822, German immigrants were recruited as small farmers to work on large landholdings. The first arrived in 1824 in São Leopoldo; over the next four decades, 27,256 more Germans came to Rio Grande do Sul, and by 1904 an estimated 50,000 had settled there. In Santa Catarina, private groups like the Hamburg Colonization Society promoted immigration, creating rural colonies that grew into cities such as Blumenau and Joinville. During the civil war, many Germans moved to Paraná from Santa Catarina, along with Volga Germans from Russia.

The Ragamuffin War (1835–1845) was a Republican uprising in Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina, led by generals Bento Gonçalves da Silva and Antônio de Souza Netto, with support from Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi. The conflict arose because charque (dried salted beef) from Rio Grande do Sul faced competition from cheaper Uruguayan and Argentine imports, while gaúchos paid high taxes to sell their product in Brazil. Garibaldi joined in 1839, helping the rebellion spread through Santa Catarina, until peace negotiations ended the war in 1845.

Italian immigration began in 1875, mostly peasants from Veneto, Trentino, and Lombardia seeking land and economic opportunity. They worked as small farmers, especially growing grapes in the Serra Gaúcha. By 1914, 100,000 Italians had settled in Rio Grande do Sul, with many others in Santa Catarina and Paraná. In 1898, there were 300,000 people of Italian origin in Rio Grande do Sul, 50,000 in Santa Catarina, and 30,000 in Paraná. Today, Italian South Brazilians number 9.7 million, making up 35.9% of the region’s population.

European immigration in the 19th century shaped the region’s demography and culture. The main ethnic origins are Portuguese, Italian, German, Austrian, Luxembourger, Polish, Ukrainian, Spanish, Dutch, and Russian, with smaller groups including French, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, African, Swiss, Croat, Lebanese, Lithuanian, Latvian, Japanese, Finnish, Estonian, Belarusian, Slovene, Ashkenazi Jew, Caboclo, British, Czech, Slovak, Belgian, and Hungarian.

The climate is subtropical or temperate, mostly Cfa and Cfb under the Köppen system, with annual averages between 12 °C and 22 °C and snow in the mountain ranges. The region is highly urbanized (82%), with cities like Curitiba and Maringá in Paraná known for urban planning. It has the highest Human Development Index in Brazil (0.859 in 2007), a 98.3% literacy rate, and the second highest per capita income ($13,396), behind only the Southeast. Portuguese is spoken by everyone, and in the countryside, dialects of German or Italian origin are also used.