I like hiking, and I’ve hiked in several places on our beautiful planet Earth, and every continent and country definitely has its charm. Yet, hiking in Brazil comes with some specific characteristics — rarely to be found anywhere else — which makes hiking special in its own way.
You see, Brazil is a very big country with a large population (200 million+), but hiking as a leisure activity is not popular at all, despite of the fact that there are so many different natural habitats in the country and so much beauty to enjoy.
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In my opinion, the reasons to that are manifold. For instance, very large swaths of land are in the hands of big landowners (which make them private property), other areas are impenetrable (such as the virgin rainforests of the Amazon and parts of the Atlantic Forest), and the “official” hiking trails in accessible areas (like in protected nature parks or nature reserves) are usually difficult to reach if you don’t have a car, badly maintained, and insufficiently marked.
An additional issue, and I think it’s an important factor, is that the vast majority of Brazilians simply has no time to just go hiking for their own pleasure, because they need to work hard to keep their heads above water, that is, to make ends meet at the end of the month. Hence, hiking is in reality an activity for the upper and higher middle class and the very rich, which is formed by only a small percentage of the total population.
Now, I’m certainly not rich — I’m just a super fan of hiking — and I have been lucky to run an online business which gives me the means to choose when I want to go hiking, well, if the weather allows it. Moreover, currently I live about ten-minutes bike ride from a freely accessible natural park in the Serra Gaucha (Rio Grande do Sul), which makes it fairly easy to just quickly go to it and just walk.
One of the specific things I like about hiking in Brazil is that there are so few people who venture out doing it, meaning that you can really enjoy Nature in solitude and silence, instead of continually stumbling over other hikers (which is often the case in other countries where hiking is popular).
Of course, the above comes with a catch, that is, because of little interest in hiking, the trails are badly maintained and marked. It’s actually a vicious circle: the government, may it be on municipal, state, or federal level, invests very little in Nature preservation or developing natural leisure activities for its people because of a general lack of interest, and this in its turn doesn’t help to motivate people to spend time in Nature.
But okay, for me it’s actually a great situation because I don’t mind an adventurous hike, I don’t mind to get my feet wet and carving my own paths through the forest, and I’m not really afraid of “scary wild animals” like snakes, jaguars, and such.
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Another thing I like about hiking in Brazil is that there’s still so much unexplored terrain. Well, maybe someone has been here or there in the past, which is indeed often the case, but many areas are so little visited that you really have the experience of rough and unspoiled Nature in which mushrooms, plants, trees and animals can just “do their thing.” If you are into that, like I am, it’s kind of paradise to hike in this country.
Then there are also so many different types of natural environments in Brazil, which makes hiking a never-ending discovery. For instance, there’s the Amazon rainforest, the Atlantic Forest, Pine and Araucaria forests, wetlands (think of the Pantanal), the coast line, dunes (such as in Lençóis Maranhenses), mangroves (like the Amazon and Bahia mangroves), swamps, mighty rivers, islands and the sea, the plenty valleys, mountains and canyons, the lowland and highland plains (Pampa and Planato), the arid, semi-humid, savanna, and desert-like regions (Caatinga and Cerrado), the warm and cold, tropical and subtropical, you name it.
All in all, it’s truly nice to spend time in Brazil’s Nature. It gives you a real sense of freedom and an authentic experience, perhaps indeed more than I have experienced in many other countries.
