The Venice of Brazil — frevo carnival, tapioca crepes at dawn, and Afro-Brazilian culture that Rio tourists never find
Recife is the capital of Pernambuco state in northeastern Brazil — the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the country and the cultural engine of the Brazilian northeast. The city is built on three rivers (Capibaribe, Beberibe, and Tejipió) draining into the Atlantic across a network of islands and 50+ bridges, earning the nickname 'Venice of Brazil'. The food of Recife is the food of the Brazilian northeast: tapioca (cassava starch flatbreads cooked on a griddle, filled with coconut, meat, cheese, or açaí — the city's definitive street breakfast), caldo de cana (fresh sugarcane juice pressed…
Recife was the capital of Dutch Brazil (Nova Holanda, 1630–1654) under Johan Maurits van Nassau — the most humanist Dutch colonial governor of the era, who brought artists (Frans Post, Albert Eckhout), built the first astronomical observatory in the Americas, and established the first synagogue in the Western Hemisphere (Kahal Zur Israel, 1636) in the Jewish community of Recife. After the Portuguese recaptured the city in 1654, many Sephardic Jewish families fled to New Amsterdam (now New York), where they established the first Jewish community in North America. The city's Afro-Brazilian cult…