Brazilians revel in icy snap as country sees rare snowfall

Unusually cold weather in Brazil, the global agricultural powerhouse, has already sent international prices for coffee and sugar higher.

Temperatures dropped across Brazil on July 29 — with rare snowfall overnight in some places — as a polar air mass advanced toward the center-south of the global agricultural powerhouse, threatening coffee, sugarcane and orange crops with frost. Cars, streets and highways were blanketed in ice while people took the opportunity to take pictures and play in the snow, building snowmen. “I am 62 years old and had never seen the snow, you know? To see nature’s beauty is something indescribable,” said truck driver Iodor Goncalves Marques in Cambara do Sul, a municipality of Rio Grande do Sul state, speaking to TV Globo network.