Rising from the center of town is the building everyone calls the Catedral de Pedra, the Cathedral of Stone, even though it is technically not a cathedral at all. Its real name is the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes, and it is built in the English Gothic style, in pale stone that gives the whole structure a transplanted European gravity. Its tower climbs 65 meters, and inside it hangs a carillon of twelve bronze bells cast by the Giacomo Crespi foundry in Italy. At night during the Christmas season the church becomes the stage for light shows, the spire glowing above a town that has made the holidays into its signature. It is the photograph everyone takes home, the silhouette that means Canela.

A few kilometers from town, the land simply drops away. At Parque do Caracol, the Caracol River pours over the edge of a basalt cliff and falls 130 meters in a single white plume into the forested canyon below. Caracol means snail, a nod to the spiraling shape of the gorge, and the falls are the reason the park exists. Visitors descend long staircases toward the base or take in the plunge from belvederes carved into the cliff edge, the spray drifting up through the Serra Geral's subtropical forest. It is the kind of landscape that makes the surrounding ecotourism obvious in hindsight: the hills around Canela are laced with trails for hiking, rock climbing, horseback riding, and rafting.

Canela leans into the cold the way other towns lean into the sun. Like its neighbor Gramado, just a few kilometers away, it draws its heaviest crowds in winter, when snow is at least possible, and at Christmas, when the town council strings it with lights and decorations and the whole place becomes a festival. It sits on the Rota Romântica, the Romantic Route that links the highland heritage towns. And then there is the curiosity: outside the Mundo a Vapor theme park, Steam World, the town has built a full-scale recreation of the 1895 Montparnasse derailment, the famous Paris accident where a steam locomotive burst through a station wall and hung nose-down over the street. In Canela, that improbable image is frozen in place as a roadside attraction.

For all its European stonework, Canela is young. Its first real settlement formed only in 1903, when Colonel João Ferreira Corrêa da Silva put down roots here, and the municipality itself was not created until the final days of 1944, taking effect on the first day of 1945. By 2018 it counted some 44,489 inhabitants spread across about 253 square kilometers of highland. It grew up fast and built deliberately for visitors, shaping itself around the waterfall and the church and the promise of cold weather. The cinnamon name is older than any of it, a small inheritance from the forest that was here first, kept by a town that turned a Brazilian highland into a place where it snows. Even its transportation tells the story of arrival: Canela has its own airport, shared with Gramado just down the road, and the steady stream of visitors it was built to receive is the engine the whole town runs on.