Beyond the beaches Brazil's urban giant beckons

New strategy

This is not primarily a city of passive sightseeing. It is a city for people who like urban texture, who enjoy moving through neighborhoods, who want to eat well, who do not mind a little ambiguity and who understand that some of the world's best travel experiences arrive not in one grand reveal but in layers.

That also helps explain why Sao Paulo fits Brazil's new strategy for engaging Chinese travelers.

Brazil has been working to make itself more visible and more bookable in China.

Embratur returned to ITB China, the largest B2B travel trade show focused on the Chinese market, in 2025 after a six-year absence.

The agency said at the time that it was making a strategic push into China with a variety of efforts, including launching a "Brazil Travel Specialist" platform in Mandarin to train Chinese travel agents and operators, an official tourism website in Mandarin and opening a public relations office in China.

Brazil also moved to expand its presence through Chinese-language promotion and partnerships with major travel companies. Reports on those efforts said agreements were signed with Trip.com Group and Tongcheng Travel.

"We are very optimistic about the growth that we will continue to see in the Chinese market," said Freixo in February. He credited the visa exemptions announced in January with much of the growth.

"This is the year of Brazil in China and we have a plan of action that will further boost the interest in knowing our culture and our natural destinations, which today are the ones that most attract the Chinese," said Freixo.

Long-haul tourism depends not only on desire, but on visibility, language access and booking infrastructure. The easier Brazil becomes to search, compare and book in Chinese, the more likely Sao Paulo is to shift from an abstract possibility to a real itinerary.

Sao Paulo has long had the substance to attract international leisure travelers, but abroad it was often overshadowed by Brazil's beach imagery and by its own reputation as a city of business first. That reputation is not wrong. Sao Paulo is a commercial powerhouse. But it is also incomplete.

The same city that hosts major corporations and trade fairs also offers one of the richest urban experiences in the Americas. It is a place where migration shaped cuisine, where culture remains publicly visible, where modernism still feels alive and where the city's immense scale generates not sterility but variety.

For Chinese travelers who are increasingly willing to go beyond the most established long-haul routes, Sao Paulo offers something more substantial than easy fantasy. It offers a real metropolis.

That may be why the city feels newly timely.

Chinese visitors looking at Sao Paulo now are not simply looking at another faraway destination. They are looking at a city that broadens the map of what Brazil means: not only beaches and samba, but museums, immigration histories, high culture, nightlife, architecture and one of the world's most exciting food scenes.

It is the cumulative force of the place: the food, the art, the greenery, the sense of scale, the energy after dark, the neighborhoods that keep shifting register from block to block, and the feeling that the city is always revealing another version of itself.

Sao Paulo asks for curiosity more than certainty. It does not hand itself over all at once.

For travelers willing to meet it on those terms, it may prove to be not only Brazil's main gateway, but also one of Latin America's great city breaks.

Alfred Romann is a freelance journalist for China Daily.