Where to Stay in Caxias do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul

What is Caxias do Sul known for?

Caxias do Sul works in metallurgy and builds buses, and the same uplands that hold those factories carry the vineyards that gave the Serra Gaúcha its name. Italian immigration is the thread through both, marked at the Monumento Nacional ao Imigrante. It is known as the Capital da Serra Gaúcha.

In Rio Grande do Sul it ranks second, behind Porto Alegre.

What are the main landmarks in Caxias do Sul?

The Monumento Nacional ao Imigrante stands for the whole story. Around it the city keeps a long museum roll: the Museum of Caxias do Sul City, the Museu Ambiência Casa de Pedra, the Museu Casa Zinani, the Museu dos Capuchinhos, and the Museu São Brás. The city's churches fill in the balance.

São Pelegrino, the Igreja de Nossa Senhora de Lourdes, and the Capela do Santo Sepulcro stand among them. Two further collections are civic rather than touristic, the Acervo Municipal de Artes Plásticas and the Centro de Memória Regional do Judiciário.

What is the history of Caxias do Sul?

Caxias do Sul dates its municipal life to 1890. Italian immigration is the origin the city claims for itself, and the Monumento Nacional ao Imigrante was raised at national scale to mark it, an unusual thing for a place of this size to build about its own beginnings. Two of its museums are houses.

The Museu Ambiência Casa de Pedra and the Museu Casa Zinani are named for the buildings they occupy, which is how a young city keeps the record of its first households. Church and industry grew in parallel. The Museu dos Capuchinhos carries a religious order in its name, while São Pelegrino and the Igreja de Nossa Senhora de Lourdes gave the parishes their landmarks, with the Capela do Santo Sepulcro a smaller addition to the same devotional line.

Industry took the working city over. Metallurgy and bus manufacturing made it a major industrial centre of its region, while grape growing kept a second economy alive on the hillsides of the Serra Gaúcha. The rural side of that story has its own keeper at Santa Lúcia do Piaí. Brazil's part in the Second World War is recorded here too, by the museum of the Força Expedicionária Brasileira.

Where is Caxias do Sul?

The city stands at 817 meters, on the high ground of the Serra Gaúcha in the northeast of Rio Grande do Sul. That elevation is the fact the rest follows from: the vineyards on the slopes, the cooler air that sets the serra apart from the lowlands of southern Brazil, and the climb any road must make to reach it. Caxias do Sul reaches past its streets.

Its territory runs to well over a thousand square kilometres of ridge, valley, and farmland, and rural districts such as Santa Lúcia do Piaí lie inside the same boundary.

What is the climate of Caxias do Sul?

Height does the tempering here. Caxias do Sul stands at 817 meters in the subtropical band of southern Brazil, and that elevation is what separates the air of the Serra Gaúcha from the warmer lowlands around it, giving these slopes conditions the vine has taken to. Seasons are marked rather than extreme.

Nothing here reads as tropical, despite the band the city sits in, and the vineyard year of pruning, growing, and harvest swings between a cool season and a warm one.

How do you get to Caxias do Sul?

Every approach is a climb. Roads into the Serra Gaúcha have to gain the plateau first, and Caxias do Sul sits on top of it at 817 meters, the largest place in the region and the point those roads converge on. Porto Alegre is the other reference point, the state capital and the only city in Rio Grande do Sul larger than this one.

Buses are built here as well as boarded. Beyond the built-up area the municipality keeps rural districts such as Santa Lúcia do Piaí, inside the same boundary.