Qualla: Aparados da Serra National Park

Aparados da Serra National Park: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Valdiney Pimenta, CC BY 2.0. Walk across the grassy plateau of Cambara do Sul and you would never guess what waits at its eastern edge. The grass runs flat to a line, and then the world ends. At Itaimbezinho the ground falls away in sheer cliffs that plunge some 720 meters to a forested floor far below, a gorge nearly six kilometers long and in places two kilometers wide. Waterfalls leap from the rim and dissolve into mist before they ever reach the bottom. This is the centerpiece of Aparados da Serra, created in 1959 as one of Brazil's very first national parks for the single purpose of protecting the canyon - a place where the high country quite literally comes to an edge.

Image: Valdiney Pimenta | CC BY 2.0

Aparados da Serra National Park: A Wound in the Lava

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Iasmini09, CC BY-SA 3.0. The rock here remembers a violence older than the Atlantic Ocean. Roughly 130 million years ago, as South America and Africa tore apart, vast floods of lava poured across the land in one of the planet's great volcanic events, leaving the layered basalts that geologists call the S...

Image: Iasmini09 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Aparados da Serra National Park: The Plateau and the Plain

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Iasmini09, CC BY-SA 3.0. The drama of Aparados da Serra is the drama of a boundary. The park straddles the line between two Brazilian states, Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina, and more importantly the line between two worlds. Above sits the Campos de Cima da Serra, the cold high grassland near a thou...

Image: Iasmini09 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Aparados da Serra National Park: Life on Both Sides

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Prdcfr, CC BY-SA 3.0. The vertical landscape sorts its wildlife by elevation. Up on the windy plateau live the red-spectacled amazon parrot, the maned wolf with its impossibly long legs, and the cougar ranging the open grassland. Down on the forested slopes, where the climate softens, the neotropical ...

Image: Prdcfr | CC BY-SA 3.0

Aparados da Serra National Park: Visiting the Edge

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. The park guards itself by limiting the crowd. No more than 1,500 visitors are admitted on any single day, a deliberate ceiling on a place that could easily be loved to ruin. Those who come walk the rim trails that trace the canyon's lip, where a single step separates the firm gra...

Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0