Brazil · Rio Grande do Sul · Porto Alegre
Vila Nova, Porto Alegre — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Vila Nova is a bairro in the southern zone of Porto Alegre, capital of Rio Grande do Sul, worked as farmland by Italian colonists from 1893 and given its outline as a named quarter of the city by a municipal law of 1959.
About Vila Nova
Where to stay in Vila Nova
The right area depends on your trip — here's what each neighbourhood is best for.
Vila Nova has no hotel row, and the beds that exist here are private lets among the gated condomínios and the surviving chácaras of the zona sul. The bairro lies about ten kilometres south of the middle of Porto Alegre, where the rooms, the offices and the long-distance bus station are. Estrada da Cavalhada is the road in.
If you are coming for the Parque Gabriel Knijnik, for the Festa do Pêssego, or for an address in the bairro rather than a sight, take the room in the centre and come south for the day.
About Vila Nova
What are the main landmarks in Vila Nova?
The Parque Gabriel Knijnik is the public sight of the bairro, 11.95 hectares of wetland and old orchard opened in October 2004, with a lookout over the Guaíba and pitanga and jabuticaba trees still bearing fruit in it. The park stands at Estrada Amapá 2001. What else Vila Nova puts on a map is community property rather than monument: the Paróquia São José de Vila Nova, whose chapel of 1906 still holds the traditional festivals of the neighbourhood, the Cemitério São José de Vila Nova, the Praça Humberto Andreatta, and the Associação Hospitalar Vila Nova, the hospital that opened here in 1965.
What is the history of Vila Nova?
Italian immigrants reached this stretch of the zona sul in 1893, and the settlement they made was called Colônia Vila Nova d'Itália. The land was sold to the families who cleared it rather than granted to them, which separated the colony from the pattern followed in the Serra Gaúcha, and the growers planted vines and peaches whose harvest still names the Festa do Pêssego. Institutions came one at a time: a school in 1897 that became the Escola Estadual Alberto Torres, a chapel in 1906, a farming cooperative with a rural credit fund in 1911, and the Associação Hospitalar Vila Nova in 1965.
Municipal law number 2022, dated 7 December 1959, made the old colony a named bairro of Porto Alegre. Ronaldinho grew up in Vila Nova.
Where is Vila Nova?
Vila Nova covers roughly 1,031 hectares of hill and hollow at the southern end of Porto Alegre, which makes it one of the larger bairros on the register of the city. Its limits are written as a list of roads, from Estrada da Cavalhada and Avenida Vicente Monteggia round to Estrada Cristiano Kraemer and Estrada Belém Velho. Arroio Capivara marks one limit.
A boundary revision that the city councillors approved at the end of 2015 pulled Morro Agudo inside the bairro, and chácaras are still worked between the gated condomínios, so the bairro keeps the rural character its Italian farms left it, inside a state capital in Brazil.
More areas in Porto Alegre
Updated September 2026