Brazil is an amazing country. There are so many unique places to visit, it’s almost impossible to narrow it down to a specific destination. This week, we’re taking another look at Brazil as part of our UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Week series. This week’s featured World Heritage Site is the Discovery Coast Atlantic Forest Reserves.

The Atlantic Forest was once an enormous forest that blanketed the entire Atlantic coast of Brazil, extending inland even into Paraguay. However, it has been extensively logged and burned to provide land for agricultural use such as sugar cane farming. Now, the once-great forest has shrunk to just a few pockets, providing shelter to primate species like the marmoset , the lion tamarin and the woolly spider monkey. Other residents include the maned sloth, the jaguar and the porcupine.

Some parts of the Discovery Coast Atlantic Forest Reserves also have the most types of trees per hectare of any forest in the entire world.

Here’s how UNESCO describes the site:

“The site displays the biological richness and evolutionary history of the few remaining areas of Atlantic forest of northeast Brazil. The site reveals a pattern of evolution of great interest to science and importance for conservation. The fact that only these few scattered remnants of a once vast forest remain, make them an irreplaceable part of the world’s forest heritage.”

The most commonly visited part of the Discovery Coast Atlantic Forest Reserves is Porto Seguro, which gets about 70,000 tourists annually according to the Encyclopedia of Earth.

If you’d like to be one of them, you’ll need a passport and a Brazilian visa. Make sure to apply for your visa in advance; see Brazilian Visa Requirements for Tourists for details on what you’ll need.

RushMyTravelVisa can simplify the process of getting a Brazilian visa by assisting you with the paperwork to help you avoid common mistakes and expediting your application with the Brazilian Embassy for the fastest possible processing.

Apply for your Brazilian visa today!

Tags: Brazil, Brazil visa, Brazilian visa, UNESCO World Heritage Sites

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 14th, 2010 at 12:48 am and is filed under World Heritage Site of the Week. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.