Where to Stay in Blumenau, Santa Catarina

What is Blumenau known for?

The Museu da Cerveja holds the brewing record and the Museu do Têxtil e da Moda da Universidade Regional de Blumenau the industry that clothed the valley, while the Museu Hering attaches that second trade to one family in particular. Colonial houses survive as well. The Casa de Hermann Blumenau, the Residência de Curt Hering and the Casa Willy Sievert are among the dwellings kept as monuments rather than replaced.

What are the main landmarks in Blumenau?

Houses carry the register here. The Casa de Hermann Blumenau, the Casa Willy Sievert, the Residência Dietrich and the two Hering residences are listed buildings, as are the Igreja Luterana and its Casa Paroquial. Museums do the interpreting.

Brewing has the Museu da Cerveja and art the Museu de Arte de Blumenau, while the Museu da Família Colonial and the Museu de Hábitos e Costumes take on the colonial household and the Museu de Ecologia Fritz Müller the natural record. Two memorials close the list. The Mausoleum of Doctor Hermann Blumenau and the Monument to the Volunteers of the Fatherland close it out.

What is the history of Blumenau?

One man's name sits on everything. Hermann Blumenau, whose house the city preserves and whose mausoleum it keeps as a listed monument, shares that name with the settlement begun in the Vale do Itajaí in 1852, and the earliest surviving fabric belongs to the colony rather than to any later administration. Faith came with the settlers.

The Igreja Luterana, known also as the Igreja do Espírito Santo, and the Casa Paroquial beside it are the religious core of that founding period, while the Museu da Família Colonial and the Museu de Hábitos e Costumes hold what the households themselves left behind. Work followed within a generation. The Hering name attaches to a museum and to two listed residences, those of Curt Hering and Max Alfred Hering, and the Museu do Têxtil e da Moda da Universidade Regional de Blumenau treats the cloth trade as a subject of study rather than nostalgia.

Other names took other trades. Willy Sievert and the Dietrich family left listed houses, the Museu da Cerveja records the brewing that grew alongside, and the Museu da Água Gunther Buhr documents how a valley city organised its water. Science kept a share as well, since the ecology museum carries the name of Fritz Müller.

The Monument to the Volunteers of the Fatherland marks the one obligation the colony owed outward.

Where is Blumenau?

The valley does the organising. Blumenau spreads across roughly 519 square kilometres of the Vale do Itajaí, so the built-up ground follows the low corridor while the slopes on either side keep it from spreading much wider. Florianópolis lies 130 kilometres off. Subtropical country in the southern hemisphere gives this part of Santa Catarina four distinguishable seasons, which is not the case further up the Brazilian coast.

What is the climate of Blumenau?

The Vale do Itajaí holds the weather in. Air settles along the valley floor and the humidity stays with it, so summer in Blumenau reads heavier than the figures suggest while the cool months are genuinely cool by the standards of anywhere further north. Winter is short but real.

Rain is spread through the year rather than saved for one season, which is why the Museu da Água Gunther Buhr has a subject at all.

How do you get to Blumenau?

Approaches follow the valley. Blumenau sits inland from the coast of Santa Catarina, and the Vale do Itajaí is the corridor that carries traffic up from the shore rather than over the hills that hem it in. Florianópolis is 130 kilometres away.

That state capital is the usual first point of arrival for anyone coming from outside, and from there the run inland ends at the colonial blocks around the Casa de Hermann Blumenau.