Garopaba surf-town house

Garopaba is where Brazilian surfing grew up and where a lot of Brazilians who can work anywhere have quietly moved. It is a former whaling village on the Santa Catarina coast, an hour and a half south of Florianopolis, set on a horseshoe bay with green hills behind and a string of beaches — Silveira, Ferrugem, Rosa, Ouvidor, Gamboa — inside twenty minutes. Southern right whales calve in these bays between July and November, close enough to watch from the cliffs.

The house is a hundred and thirty square metre build on the hillside above the town: three bedrooms, two bathrooms, an open living-dining-kitchen with a wood burner, a covered deck facing the bay, and a garden of banana and native forest on a six-hundred-square-metre plot. Concrete and timber construction with good insulation, double glazing on the sea side, solar water heating, a garage and a workshop. Six hundred metres downhill to the town beach and the fishing harbour.

The south of Brazil has real seasons. Summers are hot and busy, winters are cool — down to ten degrees at night — and the light in autumn is extraordinary. This matters for a buyer: a house here needs heating and a proper roof, and in exchange you get a temperate climate, low humidity, and none of the year-round heat that wears people down further north.

Garopaba town has around twenty-five thousand residents, with supermarkets, a hospital, schools, banks, coworking spaces, organic markets, bakeries and a food scene that runs well beyond the usual — sourdough, natural wine, sushi, seafood, and Azorean fish stews from the village's original settlers. Florianopolis international airport is ninety minutes by good highway, with direct flights to Buenos Aires, Santiago, Lisbon and across Brazil.

Prices in Santa Catarina have risen faster than anywhere on this list, driven by internal migration from Sao Paulo and by Argentinians and Uruguayans buying in dollars. A house at this level is still well under what the equivalent costs in Floripa or the Riviera de Sao Lourenco. Buying is the standard Brazilian process — CPF, lawyer, matricula, ITBI, cartorio — with an extra check that any hillside plot has its licensing and drainage in order.