Curitiba → Guarapuava

Curitiba → Guarapuava

Date: Wednesday, February 17, 2027 · Distance: ~187 mi · Driving time: ~4h 15m (excluding stops) · Open in Google Maps

Road surfaces
Asphalt · 183 mi · 98%
Unknown · 3 mi · 2%

The morning gives one last taste of Curitiba before the journey turns west into the interior of Paraná. A walk through the Botanical Garden leads into a full day of firsts: lunch and a colony to explore at Witmarsum, an unexpected cathedral at Prudentópolis, and a climb into the high country around Guarapuava by evening.

One Last Morning in Curitiba

The morning begins at the Jardim Botânico de Curitiba — enough time to walk the geometric French gardens and step inside the iron-and-glass greenhouse that's become the city's postcard image. It's often said to echo London's Crystal Palace, though the architect himself denies it, calling it a sibling instead to the city's tube-shaped bus stations; the flower beds in front repeat the pattern of Curitiba's own flag six times over. It's a fitting last look at a city defined by this kind of deliberate, playful design.

Colônia Witmarsum

West of the city, the road descends into Campos Gerais country and arrives at Colônia Witmarsum, a Mennonite settlement whose roots trace an extraordinary path: out of Frisia after centuries of persecution, into Prussia, then to south Russia in the late 1700s, and finally fleeing the Soviet Union in 1929. The families landed in Santa Catarina in 1930 and named their new home Witmarsum, after Menno Simons's own birthplace — only moving on to Paraná in 1951, when a group bought an old ranch here and started over again on higher, more fertile ground. There's time to walk the small center before lunch at Bierwit, where the German-influenced menu suits the setting exactly. Before leaving, the local cooperative's cheeses are worth picking up — a serious operation today, turning out prize-winning, geographically-certified cheese from tens of thousands of litres of milk a day. Fuel is taken on the way out of town.

Prudentópolis

The road climbs through Porto Amazonas and Irati into increasingly wooded, hillier country, and by mid-afternoon reaches Prudentópolis — a town that looks, and sounds, like nowhere else in Paraná. Around three-quarters of its population descends from Ukrainian families who arrived from Galicia starting in the 1890s, and Mass here is still said in Ukrainian. The centerpiece is the Igreja Matriz São Josafat, a Byzantine-rite cathedral finished in 1928, its five silver domes rising incongruously out of a landscape otherwise defined by araucaria pines. A short walk around the church and the streets nearby is enough to take in how completely this town kept hold of what its founders brought with them.

Arrival: Guarapuava

From Prudentópolis, the road crosses into Guarapuava's territory at the Rio Xaxim and climbs the Serra da Esperança for the day's final stretch. Guarapuava takes its name from the Tupi-Guarani for "fierce wolf," given to these grasslands when a royal expedition first pushed into them in 1810; today, at some 3,670 ft (1,120 m), it's high and cool enough to have become Brazil's official capital of barley and malt. There's no agenda for the evening — after a morning in Curitiba, a colony, and a cathedral, this is simply where the day ends.