Where to Stay in Chapecó, Santa Catarina

What is Chapecó known for?

Chapecó turns out industrialized food products on a scale that put it among the four most important cities of Santa Catarina, and the same weight shows in its banks, its colleges and the roads that meet here. Its collections carry everything else. The Museu de História e Arte de Chapecó and the Museu Tropeiro Velho hold the local record, while the Galeria Municipal de Artes Dalme Marie Grando Rauen shows the art.

What are the main landmarks in Chapecó?

Museums do most of the work. The Museu de História e Arte de Chapecó, the Museu Tropeiro Velho and the Galeria Municipal de Artes Dalme Marie Grando Rauen make up the public face of the collections. A few early buildings are still standing.

Castelinho and the Antigo Prédio da Prefeitura Municipal stand from the decades after 1917, while the Casa Histórica da Família Bertaso belongs to the family behind the colonising company.

What is the history of Chapecó?

Chapecó dates from 1917. The colonising company of Ernesto Bertaso opened the land to settlers, and the Arquivo Documental da Empresa Colonizadora Ernesto Bertaso survives as the paper trail of that operation, deed by deed and lot by lot. The family stayed.

Casa Histórica da Família Bertaso still stands, and Castelinho and the Antigo Prédio da Prefeitura Municipal date from the years when the young município was fitting itself with the buildings a seat of government needs. Industry followed the farms. Food processing turned a young município into a producer of industrialized food products for markets far beyond Santa Catarina, and banking, schooling and haulage gathered around the plants until Chapecó counted among the four most important cities of the state.

The record is kept locally. The Centro de Organização da Memória Sócio-Cultural do Oeste de Santa Catarina and the Centro de Memória Alfa/Maxi Crédito gather documents on that century of change, the Museu de História e Arte de Chapecó and the Museu Tropeiro Velho hold objects from it, and the Galeria Municipal de Artes Dalme Marie Grando Rauen shows what artists made of it.

Where is Chapecó?

Some 626 square kilometres of Santa Catarina belong to Chapecó. Farmland and food plants take up most of that ground, and the built-up part gathers around the Antigo Prédio da Prefeitura Municipal and the streets the Bertaso company laid out. Roads meet here.

Being the transport hub of western Santa Catarina puts the smaller towns of the Microregion of Chapecó within reach of a single day's travel, which is part of why the industry settled where it did.

What is the climate of Chapecó?

Chapecó sits in the subtropical belt of the southern hemisphere, so its warm months fall around the turn of the year and its cool ones in the middle, the reverse of the northern calendar. The farm year follows it. Harvests across the Microregion of Chapecó and the plants that turn them into industrialized food products both work to that rhythm, which is why the season a visitor picks changes the countryside more than it changes the town.

How do you get to Chapecó?

Chapecó works as the main transport hub of western Santa Catarina, so services from the smaller towns of the Microregion of Chapecó and from the rest of the state converge on the município before running anywhere further. Chapecó anchors those links. Financial and educational business draws people in from across the region, and the food industry moves goods out of the same município, so the connections serve trade as much as travel.