Beyond the beaches Brazil's urban giant beckons

A few months later, in January 2026, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva announced that Brazil would exempt certain categories of short-term visas for Chinese citizens, in reciprocity for the exemption China had granted Brazilians.

Travel interest spiked. According to Qunar, a major Chinese online travel platform, searches for flights to Sao Paulo jumped 22 percent hour by hour right after the announcement.

The timing is significant because Brazil is in the middle of a tourism boom.

The country closed 2025 with more than 9.2 million international visitors, a record. Sao Paulo led the country for foreign arrivals, receiving 2,753,869 international visitors throughout the year, ahead of Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul, the southern state that borders Uruguay and Argentina. That makes the city not just Brazil's financial capital, but its main gateway for foreign visitors.

Gateway to country

Sao Paulo is often the point of arrival, the place where a continent-scale trip often begins, but it is also a place worth lingering in.

What visitors find is not a city organized around a single landmark or feature, but one built on accumulation with the closest beaches sitting more than an hour away.

Sao Paulo rewards appetite: for museums, for architecture, for food, for neighborhoods and for the pleasure of noticing how many different histories have been compressed into one metropolis.

Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and many other immigrant communities have shaped the city's cuisine, traditions and public life over generations, helping create one of the world's most varied urban food scenes. Official Brazilian tourism material highlights that multicultural layering is one of the city's defining traits.

That diversity is one of Sao Paulo's most appealing aspects for travelers from China, and anywhere else.

Meals can become a kind of map.

A day might begin with strong Brazilian coffee and pao de queijo (a pastry with cheese), move on to ramen or sushi in Liberdade, continue with an Italian lunch in Bixiga or Jardins, and end the day with cocktails and plates to share in a crowded neighborhood bar.