Foz do Iguaçu (Town)

Most people treat Foz do Iguaçu as a logistics problem to solve on the way to the falls — book the closest hotel, see the water, leave the next morning. I did exactly that on my first visit and missed a genuinely strange and interesting border city sitting right there the whole time, wedged between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay at a point where you can stand in one country and see two others across the water.

The Marco das Três Fronteiras, a small obelisk-topped plaza on the riverbank, marks the exact meeting point of the three nations, and there’s something quietly absurd and moving about standing there at sunset with the Paraná and Iguaçu rivers merging below you, flags of three countries visible at once. It’s a favourite spot for locals to just sit with a beer and watch the light change, and I did the same, feeling like I’d stumbled onto the most understated great view in South America.

The city itself carries a genuine multicultural charge from decades of cross-border trade — the Templo Budista Chen Tien, one of the largest Buddhist temples in Latin America, sits incongruously amid the suburbs, built by the region’s substantial Chinese-Brazilian community, its red and gold pagoda roofline visible above the treeline from blocks away. Nearby, the Mesquita Omar Ibn Al-Khattab serves the tri-border area’s Lebanese and Syrian population, a reminder that this is one of the most ethnically layered corners of Brazil, shaped as much by Ciudad del Este’s duty-free trade across the river as by anything happening at the falls.

Dinner in Foz leans heavily on that cross-border identity — I ate the best kibbeh of my life at a family-run Lebanese restaurant a few blocks from my hotel, followed the next night by a proper churrascaria, and neither felt out of place. The Itaipu Dam, one of the largest hydroelectric plants on the planet, sits just north of town and offers night-lit visits that are, unexpectedly, almost as visually dramatic as the falls themselves — floodlit concrete on a scale that makes you feel genuinely small.

When to go: Year-round, though April to June and September to November bring the most comfortable temperatures for the city itself, alongside the best conditions for the falls next door.