The border here is the Puente Internacional Comandante Rosales, a modest 102-metre bridge over the Río Pepirí Guazú with no real town at either end — the nearest settlements are Cruce Caballero on the Argentine side and Paraíso on the Brazilian, with San Pedro and São Miguel do Oeste the closer places of any size. The crossing only opened to ordinary tourist traffic in 2018, after a twenty-year wait for Brazil to staff a migration post on its bank; before that, only cargo trucks could use it. It now runs as a summer-season crossing, open daily into the evening, popular with Argentine travelers cutting roughly 150 km off the older route to Santa Catarina's beaches — a much quieter, far less bureaucratic affair than yesterday's bridge at Foz.
The road settles into Itapiranga, the westernmost town in Santa Catarina, wedged into a corner where the state meets both Rio Grande do Sul and Argentina — the Rio Uruguai forming one border, the Rio Peperi-Guaçu the other. It's a German colony rather than the mix seen further north: founded in 1926 by Catholic families brought over by the Sociedade União Popular, first named Porto Novo before taking its current Tupi-Guarani name — "red stone" — a few years later. That German inheritance still shows in the town's dance troupes and choral groups, and in an Oktoberfest that's become the local calendar's biggest date. Tonight is simply for settling into a very different corner of Brazil than the one left behind two days ago.
Deleting this waypoint is permanent and cannot be undone.