São Luís

São Luís needs 2 days: touring the UNESCO World Heritage historic center, with its façades covered in Portuguese azulejo tiles -the largest concentration of this architecture outside Portugal-, on one, and a night of live reggae at one of its hundreds of clubs and dedicated radio stations, on the other. July-December brings the driest weather. It's inexpensive by Brazilian standards. Founded by French settlers in 1612 -the only Brazilian capital of French, not Portuguese, origin-, it's known as the «Brazilian capital of reggae»: the genre arrived via Caribbean radio in the 1970s and became a cultural identity of its own, with more devotion to Bob Marley than in almost any other city outside Jamaica.