Olimpia

Drilling in this part of Sao Paulo state in the 1980s was looking for oil and found the Guarani aquifer instead, bringing up water at around forty degrees from great depth - and the town, which had been a cattle and sugar centre with a folklore festival, turned that into a thermal resort industry. Thermas dos Laranjais is the main park, consistently among the most visited water parks in the world by annual attendance, with slides, wave pools and thermal pools fed from the wells. Around it are hotel resorts with their own thermal complexes. The town also keeps its Festival Nacional do Folclore each August, which predates the water entirely and is one of the older folklore events in the country.

History

The oldest traces of people here are four funerary urns of the 9th or 10th century, with bones, bead necklaces and pots, found by builders in the early 1990s and linked to Tupi and Macro-Jê peoples. In the 19th century the farmer Antônio Joaquim dos Santos set up the Fazenda Olhos d'Água, named for its many springs, and coffee growers followed; in 1903 the landowners asked the English immigrants Robert John Reid and William Leatherbarrow to lay out the town, which became a district of Barretos on 18 December 1906 as Vila Olímpia, after Maria Olímpia Rodrigues Vieira, daughter of one of its founders, and separated from Barretos on 7 December 1917 (Wikipedia, Olímpia).

What you'll find

• Thermal water from the aquifer - around forty degrees, found while drilling for oil.
• Thermas dos Laranjais - among the most visited water parks anywhere.
• Resort complexes - hotels with their own thermal pools around the town.
• An August folklore festival - the town's older tradition, unrelated to the water.

When to go

All year. Two days. Avoid Brazilian school holidays if you can.

Before you go

Parks are extremely crowded in holiday periods, with long queues for slides. This is a packaged family resort destination with little else around it. Prices for tickets and accommodation are high. The town itself has few attractions.

Nearby

Rio Quente in Goias is the comparable destination; Sao Jose do Rio Preto is west.