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Brazil Trails - Experiencing nature to preserve it
Whale watch
The Imbituba area, which is 80 km south from Florianópolis, hosts a noble visitor from July to November: the Arctic Right Whales (Eubalaena mysticetus) come to our coast to give birth and feed their young. Every year the Arctic Right Whales visit the seashore of Santa Catarina between July and November. Here is their natural birthplace, since they find calm water and good weather temperature to give birth. There used to be about 100.000 Arctic Right Whales in the South Hemisphere and today there are only about 7.000 of this kind left. During many decades they were hunted for commercial purposes: the fins were used as corsets and their fat was made into oil for lightening the cities and manufacture of mortar. The Santa Martha’s lighthouse, a famous city in south Brazil for its historical background, is the highest building on earth built with whale oil.
The last whale tackle in Brazil was shut down in 1973. It used to be in Imbituba. It has been rebuilt and it is protected as the only Right Whale Latin-American museum. Nowadays this species can be found along the coast of Argentina, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Uruguay and Brazil.
The boat tour to watch the whales departs from Garopaba or Imbituba, depending where the whales are located in the day of the tour. We contact the biologists of the Whale´s project, and they inform us if the whales are close to the shore, and the sea conditions. According to this info, the boat tour is scheduled. The boat tour itself takes from 1.5 to 2 hours, and it is really exciting to see these huge and docile mammals so close to us. We follow all the environamental laws that determine how close we may get to the whales and how long we may stay that close to them.
