Foz do Iguaçu is Brazil's gateway to the Iguazú Falls, and the Brazilian side has something the Argentine side doesn't: the panoramic view. Along a trail of a kilometre and a half you see almost the whole amphitheatre of falls head-on, and at the end a walkway takes you right into the cloud of spray. It's a two-hour walk that helps you grasp the scale of the place before crossing to explore it up close on the other side of the river.
But the city doesn't end with the Falls. 12 km from the centre is Itaipú, one of the largest dams in the world, which you can tour in open-top buses and even inside, all the way to the control room. There's a bird park with aviaries where you walk among toucans and macaws, a Sunni mosque from 1983, a Buddhist temple with more than a hundred statues and a viewpoint where you can see three countries at sunset.
And then there's the border, which is part of the trip. In a single day you can have breakfast in Brazil, walk the Argentine walkways and be back in Foz for dinner; or cross the Friendship Bridge to Ciudad del Este to buy electronics. For Latin Americans it's easy: in most cases your ID is enough. It's worth staying three or four days, buying tickets online and leaving some slack for the queues on the bridges.
Excavations carried out before the Itaipú lake was filled found human traces from around 6,000 BC. The last peoples before European arrival were the Guaraní and the Kaingang. In 1541-1542 the Spaniard Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca reached the Iguazú River guided by indigenous people and became the first European to see the Falls. Brazilian settlement started late: in 1881 the first two inhabitants were recorded, harvesting yerba mate and timber for export via the Paraná River. On 22 November 1889 a Military Colony was founded on the border; that same year a census counted 324 people, almost all Paraguayan and Argentine. In 1910 the colony became Vila Iguassu, on 14 March 1914 the municipality was created (formally installed on 10 June) and in 1918 it took the name Foz do Iguaçu. In 1924 the tenentista rebels set up their headquarters here. Parque Nacional do Iguaçu was created on 10 January 1939, five years after the Argentine one. The big change came with infrastructure: the Friendship Bridge to Paraguay opened on 27 March 1965 and the BR-277 highway to Curitiba and the port of Paranaguá in 1969. The construction of Itaipú (1975-1982) sent the population soaring from 33,970 in 1970 to 136,320 in 1980. In 1985 the Tancredo Neves bridge to Argentina opened, in 1986 UNESCO declared the park a World Heritage Site and in 2011 the Falls were chosen as a Natural Wonder. Since December 2022 the concessionaire Urbia+Cataratas has managed tourist visits to the park.
Read the full history ↓The southern state of araucaria pine forests and great waters: from the Jesuit missions of Guairá razed by the bandeirantes to the gold of Paranaguá, from yerba mate and the tropeiros to European immigration and the coffee of the north. Home to the Iguazú Falls, to Itaipú and to Curitiba, a world benchmark in urban planning.
Read the history of Paraná →Some places make no sense on your own; with someone explaining them, they change completely. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have over 20 activities in Foz Do Iguacu. Three are below so you get the idea: tap any of them and they all open.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before travel guides ran out of superlatives to describe the Iguazú Falls, the Guaraní had already solved the problem with two words: 'y', which means 'water', and 'guasú', which means 'big'. 'Iguazú' —written 'Iguaçu' in Portuguese— means, simply, 'big water': a name as plain as it is accurate for the formidable set of more than 270 falls with which the river plunges into the forest, and proof that those who lived in this region centuries before the Europeans arrived knew it —and named it— better than anyone.
The Brazilian city that grew opposite the river's mouth on the Paraná took the name 'Foz do Iguaçu', where 'foz' means precisely 'mouth' of a river in Portuguese. So the full place name can be read as 'the mouth of the big water': the place where the river of the great waters joins the Paraná.
For the Guaraní, the river and its falls weren't just a geographical feature but a space loaded with meaning and stories. The Guaraní legends about the origin of the falls —which have reached us in various versions— are part of the region's intangible heritage and sit alongside the scientific explanation of the falls, which are the result of ancient basaltic lava flows that formed the steps down which the river now pitches.
Before any European presence, the region of the Iguazú river and the Triple Frontier was inhabited by Guaraní-speaking peoples, who lived from hunting, fishing, gathering and growing cassava and maize in the subtropical forest. The river, the falls and the forest were part of their territory and of their symbolic world, shot through with stories and beliefs about the origin of the waters.
According to historical tradition, the first European to sight the falls was the Spanish conquistador and explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, in 1542. Cabeza de Vaca, who had been appointed adelantado of the Río de la Plata, was making an overland expedition from the Atlantic coast (in today's Santa Catarina, Brazil) towards Asunción, in the heart of Guaraní territory, when his party came upon the river's imposing falls. Amazed, he named them the 'Saltos de Santa María', though that name didn't last against the Guaraní 'Iguazú'.
Through the 16th and 17th centuries, the region fell within the sphere of the Guaraní Jesuit missions, the vast system of reductions the Society of Jesus established in the Paraná basin to evangelise and organise the Indigenous population. The area was also the setting for tensions and territorial disputes between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns, whose boundaries in this part of South America would only be settled much later.
For most of the 19th century, the Iguazú river region remained a remote, thinly populated frontier, covered in forest and far from the centres of power. Defining the boundaries between Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay in this area was a long process, shaped by the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) against Paraguay and by successive border agreements and arbitrations at the end of the 19th century.
To assert Brazilian sovereignty in this far west, the Brazilian army established a military colony in the area in 1889, known as the Colônia Militar do Iguaçu. Its mission was to occupy, watch over and populate the border, in a territory where until then small groups working in yerba mate and timber extraction predominated, many of them of Paraguayan and Argentine origin. That military post was the seed of the future city.
Over time, the settlement grew around the colony and around border trade. On 10 June 1914 the municipality of Vila Iguaçu was officially created, and shortly afterwards it was renamed Foz do Iguaçu. Through the first decades of the 20th century, the city grew slowly as a border crossing point and the centre of a farming and forestry region, still far from the great push that would come later with falls tourism and, above all, with the building of the Itaipú dam.
As the 20th century advanced, the Iguazú Falls gained international fame as one of the natural wonders of South America, and with it grew the awareness that both the falls and the vast expanse of Atlantic forest around them needed protecting. That forest, the Mata Atlântica, is one of the richest and at the same time most threatened biomes on the planet, home to species such as the jaguar (onça-pintada), the tapir, the yaguareté and an immense variety of birds.
In 1939 the Brazilian government created the Parque Nacional do Iguaçu, one of Brazil's first national parks, with the aim of preserving the set of falls on the Brazilian side and a vast area of forest. On the Argentine side, the Parque Nacional Iguazú had been created a few years earlier, in 1934. Together, the two parks make up one of the largest protected remnants of inland Atlantic forest on the continent, and they form a vital corridor for the region's wildlife.
Worldwide recognition came in 1986, when UNESCO inscribed the Parque Nacional do Iguaçu (Brazil) on the World Heritage list for its exceptional natural value; the neighbouring Argentine park had already been inscribed in 1984. The listing enshrined the falls and their forest surroundings as heritage belonging to all humanity, and reinforced the commitment to conservation against pressures such as deforestation, poaching and unchecked development. Today the park is the most visited in Brazil and a model of nature tourism.
If the falls made Foz do Iguaçu famous, it was an engineering project that completely changed its scale and its economy: the Itaipú Binacional dam. In 1973, Brazil and Paraguay signed the Itaipú Treaty, under which the two countries agreed to jointly exploit the enormous hydroelectric potential of the Paraná river, which marks the border between them. It was an unprecedented project: a power plant shared, in equal parts, by two nations.
Work began in 1975 and continued into the early 1980s, in one of the largest engineering undertakings in the world. Construction meant diverting the course of the Paraná, raising a dam some 8 kilometres long and creating a gigantic reservoir. The project drew tens of thousands of workers from all over Brazil and Paraguay, which sent the population of Foz do Iguaçu soaring within a few years, turning a relatively small border town into a large multicultural urban centre. The plant came online in 1984 and, for decades, was the world's biggest producer of hydroelectric power (until it was overtaken in annual output by China's Three Gorges dam, though Itaipú held on to historic generation records).
Building Itaipú also had social and environmental costs. Filling the reservoir flooded vast areas, among them the celebrated Guairá Falls (Sete Quedas), a set of cascades that many considered as impressive as those at Iguazú and which were submerged forever beneath the lake. The filling also forced communities to be relocated. Even so, Itaipú turned Foz into a first-rate energy, tourism and economic hub, and the dam itself —with its visitor circuits— became one of the region's great attractions.
Today's Foz do Iguaçu is a city deeply shaped by its status as a triple border. Within a few kilometres lie three countries —Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay— linked by two great bridges: the Tancredo Neves Bridge, over the Iguazú river, joining Foz with Puerto Iguazú (Argentina), and the Friendship Bridge, over the Paraná river, joining it with Ciudad del Este (Paraguay). The Marco das Três Fronteiras, at the confluence of the two rivers, symbolises that meeting of nations.
The Itaipú boom and tourism brought communities from the most diverse parts of the planet to Foz. Today the city is home to substantial Arab (above all Lebanese and Syrian-Lebanese), Chinese, Paraguayan, Argentine, paranaense, gaúcho and many other communities, which shows in its food, its places of worship —from a large mosque to one of the biggest Buddhist temples in Latin America— and its daily life. That mix makes Foz one of the most cosmopolitan and plural cities in Brazil.
Economically, the city rests on three great pillars: nature tourism (the falls, the National Park, the Parque das Aves), the Itaipú energy hub and intense border trade, fed by the constant flow of shoppers towards Ciudad del Este. Foz do Iguaçu has thus established itself as one of the leading tourist destinations in Brazil and the Southern Cone: a place where the most imposing nature, the most colossal engineering and the most vibrant cultural diversity live side by side in one corner of the continent, on the banks of the 'big water'.
