Chapecó () is a municipality in the state of Santa Catarina, in the Southern Region of Brazil. Located in the western part of the state, it has an estimated population of 289,170 inhabitants as of 2026, making it the sixth-most populous municipality in Santa Catarina.
Chapecó is a major regional center for industry, commerce, services, finance and education. Its economy is strongly associated with agribusiness and the food-processing industry, particularly the production and processing of poultry and pork.
The city serves as an economic and service center for a broader region encompassing western Santa Catarina and parts of northwestern Rio Grande do Sul and southwestern Paraná.
Located approximately by road from the state capital, Florianópolis, Chapecó is the seat of the Metropolitan Region of Chapecó. It is also an important center for higher education, with institutions including the Federal University of Fronteira Sul (UFFS), Santa Catarina State University (UDESC), Unochapecó, Unoesc and UCEFF.
Internationally, Chapecó is best known as the home of Chapecoense, a professional association football club. The city and the club received worldwide attention following the crash of LaMia Flight 2933 in 2016, which killed 71 people, including most of Chapecoense's first-team players and staff.
Etymology
The name Chapecó is of Kaingang origin, although several interpretations of its meaning have been proposed. A municipal historical account records interpretations including “high plateau”, “hat made of vines” and “put it in the hat”. Drawing on the research of judge Antônio Selistre de Campos, the same account derives the name from the Kaingang elements echa, apê and gô, interpreted as “from where the path to the fields can be seen”.
Both Chapecó and Xapecó have historically been used as spellings of the Indigenous-derived place name. The use of initial Ch or X became the subject of public and official debate during the 1940s, including articles by Selistre de Campos in the newspaper A Voz de Chapecó and discussion during the revision of Santa Catarina's territorial division. Contemporary research on those sources concludes that the Indigenous origin of the name is well established, while the historical debate did not establish that either spelling was linguistically definitive. The form Chapecó ultimately remained the official spelling of the municipality, whereas Xapecó continues in regional Indigenous toponyms, including the Terra Indígena Xapecó.
History
The territory of present-day western Santa Catarina was traditionally inhabited by Indigenous peoples, particularly the Kaingang. Historical records document Kaingang occupation in the region between Palmas, Chapecó and the Irani River during the nineteenth century, before the large-scale colonization of western Santa Catarina.
One of the earliest documented Luso-Brazilian expeditions into the wider region was led in the 1720s by the bandeirante Zacarias Dias Côrtes, who explored territory south of the Iguaçu River and reached the upper Uruguay River region in search of gold.
The area later became involved in disputes over the boundary between the Spanish and Portuguese possessions in South America. During renewed boundary surveys in 1789, the Spanish geographer Joaquim Gondim travelled along the upper Uruguay River and reached the mouth of the present-day Chapecó River. Gondim argued that the Chapecó, rather than the Pepiri-Guazu River, was the boundary river intended in the earlier agreements between Spain and Portugal. The territorial disagreement was later inherited by Brazil and Argentina and became part of the Argentina–Brazil border dispute, which was settled in Brazil's favor in 1895 by an arbitral decision of United States president Grover Cleveland.
By the nineteenth century, Caboclo communities were established throughout the region. Their livelihoods were based largely on subsistence agriculture, yerba mate extraction, livestock raising and activities associated with tropeiro routes across the southern plateau. In 1859, the Brazilian imperial government authorized the creation of the Military Colony of Xapecó as part of its effort to secure the frontier. The colony was installed in 1882 at Campina do Xanxerê, in the area of present-day Xanxerê, and was directed until 1898 by José Bernardino Bormann, who later attained the rank of marshal in the Brazilian Army.
A separate territorial dispute between Santa Catarina and Paraná persisted into the early twentieth century and formed part of the background to the Contestado War. The two states reached a boundary agreement in 1916, after which the government of Santa Catarina reorganized the newly incorporated western territory. Chapecó was created as a municipality by Santa Catarina State Law No. 1,147 on 25 August 1917 and formally installed on 14 November of that year.
Its first municipal seat was established at Passo Bormann, in the area of the present-day Marechal Bormann district. The seat was transferred to Xanxerê in 1919, returned to Passo Bormann in 1923 and was again transferred to Xanxerê in 1929. In 1931, it was permanently established at Passo dos Índios, the settlement from which the present urban center developed. In 1938, the municipality, then named Passo dos Índios, was renamed Chapecó.
Private land-colonization companies became increasingly important after the municipality was created. Bertaso, Maia & Cia. was founded in Passo Fundo, Rio Grande do Sul, in 1918 by Ernesto Francisco Bertaso and the brothers Manuel Passos Maia and Agilberto Atílio Maia. The company transferred its headquarters to Passo dos Índios in 1922. The partnership was dissolved in 1923, after which its activities continued under the Empresa Colonizadora Ernesto Francisco Bertaso. The colonization companies subdivided and sold land and promoted the settlement of families arriving mainly from Rio Grande do Sul, many of them descendants of Italian and German immigrants. This organized colonization occurred in a territory already occupied by Kaingang and caboclo populations and was accompanied by disputes over land possession and property rights.
Between 1943 and 1946, Chapecó formed part of the Federal Territory of Iguaçu, which incorporated portions of western Santa Catarina and Paraná. The municipality returned to Santa Catarina when the federal territory was abolished in 1946. The memory of the twentieth-century colonization became a prominent element of Chapecó's civic symbolism. O Desbravador, a 14-metre monument created by artist Paulo de Siqueira and inaugurated on 25 August 1981, depicts a gaúcho holding an axe and a laurel branch, symbols respectively associated with work and achievement. It was conceived to commemorate the colonizers locally described as the city's "desbravadores". The monument does not depict Ernesto Bertaso or any other specific individual, but rather an idealized representation of the colonizer; it subsequently became one of the city's best-known landmarks and was designated municipal cultural heritage in 2020. The adjacent Praça Coronel Bertaso also preserves the Bertaso name in the central civic landscape of Chapecó.
Geography
Chapecó is located in western Santa Catarina, in the Southern Region of Brazil. The municipality covers an area of . Its southern portion reaches the valley of the Uruguay River, which forms the interstate boundary between Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul in this sector.
Administrative divisions
Chapecó is divided into five districts: Chapecó, which contains the municipal seat, Alto da Serra, Figueira, Goio-Ên and Marechal Bormann.
In Chapecó's territorial organization, districts (), neighborhoods () and loteamentos are distinct spatial units. Districts are the largest internal administrative subdivisions of the municipality and may encompass both urban settlements and rural territory. Neighborhoods are smaller, officially delimited territorial units used in the organization of the urban area and do not have the same administrative status as districts. A loteamento, by contrast, is a form of land subdivision in which a tract is divided into building lots with the creation, extension or alteration of streets or other circulation areas. A loteamento is therefore not itself a district or a neighborhood; several loteamentos may be located within the same neighborhood, although the names of loteamentos are often used informally as local place names.
The subdivision of Chapecó into neighborhoods has changed as the urban area expanded. Municipal Decree No. 12,696 of 7 April 2004 delimited 31 neighborhoods. Following the adoption of the 2014 Master Plan, Municipal Decree No. 32,292 of 14 March 2016 established the boundaries of 50 neighborhoods; Municipal Decree No. 41,388 of 27 October 2021 subsequently revised neighborhood boundaries. A geographic study published in 2023 recorded 51 neighborhoods, while subsequent changes increased the number further. The official municipal map published in June 2026 identifies 55 neighborhoods.
Under the current Master Plan, enacted by Complementary Law No. 847 of 20 December 2024, the creation, extinction or merger of neighborhoods requires specific municipal legislation preceded by collective participation and a public hearing. The plan also provides for adjustments to neighborhood boundaries when new approved and registered loteamentos, condominiums or land-regularization areas are incorporated into the urban fabric.
Population figures by neighborhood were published by the IBGE for the 2022 Brazilian census. The census dataset contains 50 neighborhood units. Because Chapecó's neighborhood structure and some boundaries have changed since the census reference date, the figures below reproduce the IBGE's 2022 neighborhood geography and have not been recalculated according to the 2026 boundaries. Five neighborhoods in the current municipal division—Castanheira, Florência, Jardins do Vale, Millenium and Perimetral—do not appear as separate units in the 2022 dataset and are therefore shown without an individual population figure.
The twenty largest published neighborhood units are summarized in the chart; the remaining 30 units are grouped as "Other neighborhood units". Percentages are calculated from the 228,666 residents assigned by the IBGE to the 50 published neighborhood units, rather than from the total municipal population.
+ Current neighborhoods and population in the 2022 census Neighborhood Population(2022) Água Santa 6 Alvorada 4,050 Araras 1,175 Bela Vista 6,515 Belvedere 2,580 Boa Vista 1,477 Bom Pastor 5,096 Bom Retiro 170 Campestre 215 Castanheira — Centro 15,960 Cristo Rei 5,484 Desbravador 2,426 Dom Gerônimo 230 Dom Pascoal 185 Efapi 41,790 Eldorado 2,715 Engenho Braun 4,710 Esplanada 7,542 Florência — Fronteira Sul 36 Industrial 9 Jardim América 4,277 Jardim Europa 277 Jardim Itália 6,611 Jardins 310 Jardins do Vale — Lajeado 124 Líder 6,770 Maria Goretti 4,602 Millenium — Monte Belo 92 Palmital 4,352 Paraíso 5,039 Parque das Palmeiras 5,256 Passo dos Fortes 12,978 Perimetral — Pinheirinho 4,545 Presidente Médici 10,282 Progresso 2,381 Quedas do Palmital 2,368 Saic 3,336 Santa Maria 5,448 Santa Paulina 1,691 Santo Antônio 9,031 Santos Dumont 533 São Cristóvão 11,722 São Lucas 2,153 São Pedro 2,356 Seminário 4,594 Trevo 1,344 Universitário 5,976 Vederti 1,251 Vila Real 5,497 Vila Rica 1,099
Note: A dash (—) indicates that the current neighborhood was not published as a separate neighborhood unit in the IBGE's 2022 dataset; it does not indicate zero population. The 50 neighborhood units for which the IBGE published individual figures contained a combined population of 228,666. This is lower than the municipality's total census population of 254,785 because the neighborhood aggregates do not cover the entire municipal territory, particularly rural areas.
Geology and relief