Classroom lesson · Coastline · 🇧🇷 Brazil

Brazil's 7,400 km of coast

A beach country - more than 2,000 beaches along the Atlantic Ocean

Copacabana beach curving along the Atlantic coast in Rio de Janeiro

Photo · Wikimedia Commons

What is it?

Brazil's coast on the Atlantic Ocean is 7,400 kilometres long. That is roughly the distance from London to New York and back again. Along it are more than 2,000 different beaches - some bustling and famous, some quiet enough that you can walk for hours and not see anyone.

Tell me more

The most famous beaches sit in Rio de Janeiro - Copacabana and Ipanema. They are right next to the city, so you can finish school, walk ten minutes, and be playing in the waves. The sand is fine and pale, and the water is warm almost all year round.

Further north, in places like Bahia and Pernambuco, the beaches are lined with coconut trees and the water is calmer. You can see straight to the bottom in many places. Reef pools form along the shore at low tide, full of tiny fish that kids can wade among.

Out in the Atlantic, off the coast of Brazil, there is a tiny chain of islands called Fernando de Noronha. It is one of the best places in the world to see sea turtles. Each year they swim ashore to lay their eggs, and a few months later the baby turtles hatch and scramble back to the sea.

Brazilians love their beach culture. People play football, volleyball and a sport called footvolley (volleyball but you can't use your hands - only feet and head) on the sand. The beach is a giant outdoor classroom where children grow up swimming, surfing and watching the ocean change with the wind.

In the classroom

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Talk together

Discussion prompts

  1. 01What is the longest you have ever walked along a beach? How does 7,400 km compare?
  2. 02How might living next to the ocean change the way a child grows up?
  3. 03Footvolley is a sport invented on Brazilian beaches. If you invented a beach sport, what would the rules be?
Try this

Classroom activity

Mark out a 'beach' shape on the playground with chalk: 7.4 metres long. Tell the class this is 1 millionth of Brazil's coast. Try to imagine each step being a kilometre - how many of your friends could fit along it?