Petrópolis – The Ministry of Tourism hopes to increase the number of foreigners visiting Brazil by 30% by 2016, the year of the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games. The statement was made on Friday (18) by minister Pedro Novais, while visiting Petrópolis, in the Rio de Janeiro mountain range. Currently, around five million foreigners visit Brazil each year.
Novais also said that the federal government hopes to solve the bottlenecks in the main Brazilian airports by 2014. "We need airports to foster tourism. I know that there are problems, but, from what I have been discussing within the government and from what I heard from the president [Dilma Rousseff], it is our main interest to have all this sorted out before the 2014 [World] Cup," he said.
*Translated by Mark Ament
