Highlands Country

Just one hundred kilometres from the coast are mountains more than 1,000 metres high and towns such as São Joaquim in the middle of a national park covering 49,000 hectares - a real tourist attraction during June and July when the landscape is covered in snow. As well as São Joaquim up in the mountains is Lages, one of the first places in the state to offer countryside tourism with horseback-riding on the old estates, and another national park, Aparados da Serra, on the border with the state of Rio Grande do Sul where there are significant areas of the Mata Atlântica reserve and where the mountains are separated from each other by vertical walls almost 250 kilometres high, 720 metres deep and varying in width between 100 and 2,000 metres.