Brazil

Too large to have a single character. There is the Atlantic coast, all granite headlands and forest running down to the water; the Pantanal, the biggest wetland in the world; Iguaçu, where a river falls off a plateau in two hundred and seventy places at once.

And under the limestone country near Bonito, flooded caves where a single shaft of daylight drops a hundred metres through a hole in the ground and lights up stalagmites standing in water that has not moved in millennia.