Where to Stay in Recife, Pernambuco

What is Recife known for?

Stone reefs offshore gave Recife both its name and its shelter, and inside them grew the main harbour of the Captaincy of Pernambuco, shipping the sugar cane that the captaincy produced on a large scale. The port still works. Museu Cais do Sertão turns the old dockside toward the interior it once shipped for, and Paço do Frevo gives the city's music a building of its own.

What are the main landmarks in Recife?

Ten museums against ten churches. Museu do Estado de Pernambuco, Museu de Arte Moderna Aloísio Magalhães, Museu do Trem and the Francisco Brenand Sculpture Park carry the state's collections, while Museu Cais do Sertão and Paço do Frevo take the port and the music. The churches are older.

Basilica of Our Lady of the Rock, the Church of Our Lady of Pilar and the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary of Saint Antony of the Black People each carry a separate parish history.

What is the history of Recife?

Recife was founded in 1537. The harbour came first and everything else followed it, because the Captaincy of Pernambuco needed a port for sugar cane grown on a large scale, and the water sheltered by the offshore reefs supplied one. Sugar paid for the churches.

Convent and Church of Santo Antônio, the Basilica and Convent of Nossa Senhora do Carmo and the Church of Our Lady of Pilar belong to the centuries when that trade set the terms. For a while it answered to another name. In the seventeenth century Recife served as Mauritsstad, capital of the colony of New Holland in Dutch Brazil, which gave the port a second identity before the earlier one returned.

Parishes trace what came after. Igreja Matriz de Santo Antônio, the Church of the Mother of God and the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary of Saint Antony of the Black People each stand for a congregation, the last of them for one the others did not serve. The rivers kept their say.

Bridges over the Capibaribe and the Beberibe multiplied past fifty as the city spread across its islands, and the Recife City Museum and Museu do Estado de Pernambuco hold the paperwork for all of it.

Where is Recife?

Two rivers and a reef. The Capibaribe and the Beberibe come together at Recife before draining into the South Atlantic, and the stone reefs lying offshore give the coast the shelter the city is named for. Islands take up the rest.

More than 50 bridges tie them into one municipality of roughly 219 square kilometres, which is where the comparison with Venice comes from.

What is the climate of Recife?

The South Atlantic sets the terms. Recife lies open to the ocean inside the tropics of the southern hemisphere, which keeps temperature steady across the year and leaves rainfall as the variable deciding how a day in the city goes. Rivers answer to it.

The Capibaribe and the Beberibe run through the built-up part, so the wet half of the year is a presence at ground level as much as overhead, and the museums, Paço do Frevo and Museu de Arte Moderna Aloísio Magalhães among them, take the overflow.

How do you get to Recife?

Everything in Pernambuco funnels here. Recife is the state capital and the largest urban area of its region, so arrivals from outside the state generally reach the city itself rather than anywhere nearby, and the seaport still handles the water side. Inside it, bridges rule.

More than 50 of them carry traffic between the islands, which makes the crossing rather than the kilometre the real unit of a trip between Santo Antônio, Madalena and the dockside at Museu Cais do Sertão.