🇧🇷 Brazil · South
Gravatal is a small municipality in southern Santa Catarina, known above all as a hot springs destination: its mineral-rich hot springs have made it a spa town and a place of rest, health and wellbeing much visited across the region. Surrounded by farmland and hills, it is a quiet break for relaxing in thermal pools, far from the bustle of the coast.
The tourist heart of Gravatal is its complexes and hotels with thermal pools, which draw on the area's natural hot springs. The water is credited with relaxing and health-giving properties, in a spa tradition that defines the municipality's identity. The offer ranges from resort hotels with thermal water parks to a water park open to the public by the day and pousadas built around rest.
This guide covers the essentials of Gravatal with a practical eye: how to get here and get around, what the springs and the spa complexes offer, what else there is in the rural and highland surroundings of southern Santa Catarina, where to sleep and eat, and how to combine it with the sierra, the coast and the region's canyons. Gravatal is hot springs, rest and quiet country life: a relaxing break in southern Santa Catarina.
Gravatal grew in southern Santa Catarina, a region settled by European immigrants and shaped by farming, around the discovery and use of its hot springs. The finding of hot mineral water in the area drove the development of spa tourism through the 20th century, with the building of baths and hotels that turned the town into a spa resort. The municipality was constituted as such in the 20th century, splitting from neighbouring towns, and consolidated its calling as a destination for health, rest and wellbeing. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The southern state of beaches, islands and cool highlands: settled by Azoreans, Germans and Italians, stage of Garibaldi's short-lived Juliana Republic and of the bloody Guerra do Contestado. Land of Florianópolis and its dozens of beaches, of the Blumenau Oktoberfest and of the only corner of Brazil where it regularly snows.
Read the history of Santa Catarina →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
At some point in the 1930s and 1940s, in a rural corner of southern Santa Catarina, the Zappelini family found something strange on their land: hot water was coming up out of the ground. It was no ordinary spring but mineral water at around 37 °C —almost the temperature of the human body—, alkaline and with properties that would soon be credited to health. That almost domestic find would change forever the fate of a small farming village then called Gravatá and known today across southern Brazil as Gravatal, Santa Catarina's spa capital.
Before that water, Gravatal was pure country life. The town sits in southern Santa Catarina, a region whose settlement was tied to European colonisation and to farming. Through the 19th century and the early 20th, the south of the state took in immigrants from various origins —among them descendants of Portuguese Azoreans from the coast (the same people who, from the colony of Laguna, raised churches such as the Igreja de São Sebastião in 1842), as well as Germans and Italians— who settled the countryside and shaped the rural communities of the area.
The name says everything about that past: 'Gravatal' (formerly 'Gravatá') refers to the presence of gravatás, wild bromeliads that were abundant in the region, a plant-rooted place name of a kind very common in Brazil. For a long time Gravatal was a small farming community in the interior of southern Santa Catarina, part of the network of towns around Tubarão, on which it depended administratively. Nothing suggested that this village of field hands would end up one of the most famous spa resorts in the country.
The landmark that defined Gravatal's identity was precisely that discovery of hot water on the Zappelini family's land. What began as a country curiosity soon caught the interest of entrepreneurs who saw the potential of the resource. The decisive step came on 19 July 1956, when four partners —Dr José Agostinelli, Ramiro Corrêa Ferreira da Silva and the brothers Hercílio and Aldo Zappelini— founded the Sociedade Companhia de Águas Termais do Gravatal, taken with the landscape and the unusual geology of the place. That same year work began on capturing and storing the thermal water and on building public baths and a hotel.
In 1958 the first Hotel Termas opened its doors with just 20 rooms: the official birth of spa tourism in the region. Demand grew so fast that the hotel had to be enlarged in 1969 and again in 1976. Spa bathing, a long tradition in Europe and in many parts of the world, found favourable ground in Gravatal, and the town began drawing visitors from all over southern Brazil in search of relaxation, health and body care. The water was credited with benefits for rheumatism, circulation, the skin and stress, and its reputation grew by word of mouth.
This development transformed the local economy, previously farming-based, turning it towards health and rest tourism. Baths and hotels were added around the springs, and Gravatal established itself as the spa resort par excellence of southern Santa Catarina, an identity it keeps to this day and one that was decisive in the town's claim for autonomy in 1961.
Driven by its new spa calling, Gravatal claimed administrative independence. On 20 December 1961, under state law no. 802, it was raised to the status of a municipality under the name Gravatal —until then it was known as Gravatá—, splitting from Tubarão, on which it had depended for decades; the municipality was officially installed on 29 December that same year. The consolidation of spa tourism as the key economic activity went with, and largely explained, this process, giving the town a clear profile as a destination for health, rest and wellbeing.
Over the following decades the tourist offer diversified and modernised: alongside the old baths and the pioneering Hotel Termas came new resort hotels with thermal water parks, spas, hydrotherapy and services built around relaxation. The town, small and set in the countryside, kept a quiet atmosphere, in contrast with the mass destinations of the Santa Catarina coast, and bet on family wellbeing tourism on a full-board basis.
Today Gravatal is known across the region as the spa resort of southern Santa Catarina, a restful break tied to its hot water. Its location between the sierra and the coast of the south of the state also makes it a possible base for exploring the highland nature, the canyons of the Serra Geral and the region's beaches.
What sets Gravatal apart from other spa resorts is the reputation of its water. The town's thermo-mineral spring, alkaline and sulphurous and with an average temperature of around 37 °C —very close to that of the human body—, became known for its quality and for the properties traditionally credited to it for relaxation, circulation and various wellbeing treatments. That singularity turned 'the Termas do Gravatal' into a tourist brand recognised across southern Brazil.
Rather than a single large bathhouse, Gravatal's spa complex took shape as a set of independent resort hotels, each with its own pools fed by the thermal water, plus a water park open to the public by the day. Over time the offer modernised: the baths were joined by spas, hydrotherapy, immersion tubs, regional food and leisure activities for the whole family, in step with the growing demand for health and wellbeing tourism.
A distinctive trade grew up around the springs as well: the municipality's 'shopping a céu aberto', with more than a hundred shops, and a notable industry making feather and sheep's-wool pillows and duvets, which became another local emblem. Today Gravatal combines its quiet rural calling with its identity as the spa resort of southern Santa Catarina, and its location between the sierra, the canyons and the coast makes it a restful base within a wider tourist circuit around southern Santa Catarina.