Itajaí-Açu River Blumenau, Brazil Live Cam

The Itajaí-Açu runs through the middle of Blumenau, a city founded by German settlers in Santa Catarina, southern Brazil. The webcam belongs to a rowing club on the bank and looks upstream at the bridge.

This river floods. The valley funnels rain off the Serra do Mar into a narrow channel, and the water has come over the banks and into the centre repeatedly, worst of all in 1983 and 1984 and again with the landslides of 2008.

Blumenau was founded in 1850 by a German pharmacist whose name it carries, and the settlers held onto their language for generations. The Oktoberfest held here each October is the largest German festival anywhere outside Germany.