Drive west on Glades Road, past the gates of the country clubs and the glass towers where Brazilian families have set up companies, and you reach a quieter truth about the Brazilians in Boca Raton. They did not come here to wait tables. They came to build, to invest, and to raise children inside one of South Florida’s most carefully manicured cities. Boca is not Little Brazil. It is the place Brazilians move to once they have made it.
The Place
Boca Raton sits in southern Palm Beach County, a planned resort city whose present shape was drawn in the 1920s by the society architect Addison Mizner, who gave it pink stucco, barrel-tile roofs and a Mediterranean fantasy of arches and courtyards. Mizner’s exclusive Cloister Inn, finished in 1926, survives today as The Boca Raton resort, and his name is stamped across the city, most famously on Mizner Park.
The city grew rich twice. First on Mizner’s land boom, then on technology: in 1967 IBM opened a plant here, and it was in Boca Raton, in 1981, that the first IBM personal computer was built.
What remains is one of the wealthiest cities in the county, built around the largest enclosed shopping mall in Palm Beach County, Town Center at Boca Raton. It is the kind of place where success announces itself quietly, in landscaping and school districts.
How It Became Brazilian
To understand the Brazilians in Boca Raton, you have to start a few miles south, in Broward County, where the story really begins.
The northern Broward beachhead
The first large wave of Brazilians reached the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s, fleeing the hyperinflation that wiped out savings overnight back home. In South Florida the surge came a little later, through the late 1990s and into the 2000s. They did not scatter evenly. They concentrated in the northeastern corner of Broward County: Deerfield Beach, Pompano Beach, Oakland Park, Coconut Creek, Lighthouse Point.
That corner became one of the densest Brazilian settlements in the country, of a piece with the older Brazilian community that took root in Framingham, Massachusetts and the Brazilian quarter of the Ironbound in Newark. In the community it is said, only half in jest, that Pompano Beach holds the greatest concentration of Brazilians in the United States. Today Deerfield Beach counts around 7,470 residents of Brazilian origin and Pompano Beach around 3,813, and the commercial corridors of both cities are lined with Brazilian bakeries, butchers, churches and travel agencies.
The move north into Palm Beach County
Boca Raton sits directly above that Broward beachhead, separated only by a county line and a few minutes on Federal Highway. As the first generation of Brazilians prospered, painters who became contractors, cleaners who bought the cleaning company, restaurateurs who opened a second location, they did what immigrants everywhere do. They followed the schools and the safer streets north.
Census figures tell the difference plainly. Boca Raton already had a reputation among South Florida’s diaspora communities as a place of arrival, from the large Jewish community that helped define modern Boca to the retirees and families in neighbouring Delray Beach. Where the Broward hubs read as working-class Brazilian neighbourhoods, Boca Raton’s Brazilian presence is smaller in number but heavier in income. Portuguese speakers make up roughly 2.8 percent of the city’s residents, a notable share for a city this affluent, and the families behind that figure tend to be professionals, business owners and investors rather than recent arrivals.
The investor migration
The second, quieter Brazilian migration to Boca did not come up Federal Highway at all. It arrived by plane, with capital. Florida and Brazil have traded heavily for decades, and Brazil has become one of the largest sources of EB-5 investor-visa applicants in the world, the biggest in South America. In 2024 Brazilian investors received more EB-5 visas than any other South American nationality.
Much of that money looks for a home in exactly the kind of mixed-use luxury development Boca specialises in. The Via Mizner project downtown was financed in part through EB-5 capital. For a certain kind of Brazilian entrepreneur, opening a US arm of the family business and putting the children in a Palm Beach County school, Boca Raton is the obvious landing place.
A community that points two directions
The result is a Brazilian community that lives in Boca but shops, worships and gathers partly across the county line. A family in Boca might attend a Portuguese-language service on a Sunday, buy pão de queijo and cuts of picanha at a Brazilian butcher off State Road 7, and drive twenty minutes south for the big October festival on the Deerfield shore. The geography is split, but it is one community.
The Landmarks
Boca Brazil Supermarket, 22819 State Road 7, Boca Raton. For more than fifteen years this market on the city’s western edge has been the pantry of the Brazilian west side, with a full butcher offering personalised cuts, plus pamonha, pão de queijo and trays of salgadinhos. It is the kind of shop where Portuguese is the working language and the meat counter is the social hub.
Restaurante Brasil, 23160 Sandalfoot Plaza Drive, Boca Raton. A fast-casual buffet in the Sandalfoot corner of west Boca, heaped with more than ten cuts of grilled meat and a long line of Brazilian sides. It is unfussy, well loved, and priced for families rather than tourists.
Picanha Brazil, 22797 State Road 7, Boca Raton. A by-the-weight churrascaria a short stretch up the same highway, where diners serve themselves from a buffet and a carving station and pay by what their plate weighs. The name is a promise: picanha, the rump cap, is the cut Brazilians treat as sacred.
New Hope Brazilian Baptist Church, 640 Hastings Street, Boca Raton. A Portuguese-speaking congregation rooted in the city itself, with a sister location down in Deerfield Beach. For many immigrant families the Brazilian evangelical church is the first institution they join and the one that anchors them.
Mizner Park, 327 Plaza Real, Boca Raton. Boca’s Mediterranean-style outdoor centre of shops, restaurants, the Boca Raton Museum of Art and an amphitheatre, opened in 1991 and named for the city’s founding architect. It is where Brazilian Boca goes to spend its success, not its Saturdays of homesickness.
Town Center at Boca Raton, 6000 Glades Road, Boca Raton. The largest enclosed mall in Palm Beach County and a magnet for Brazilian visitors as much as residents. For decades the strong real, weak dollar shopping run to South Florida malls has been a Brazilian middle-class ritual, and Town Center is one of its temples.
Brazilian Festival of South Florida, Deerfield Beach. Founded in 2012 and billed as the largest Brazilian festival in the southeastern United States, it draws Boca families south each autumn to the Broward shore for samba, food and the colours of the flag. It is the one day a year the scattered community gathers in one place.
Where They Came From
Brazil is not one place, and neither is Brazilian Boca. The largest streams into South Florida have long come from the state of Minas Gerais, the inland highlands whose mineiros built much of the Brazilian diaspora in the northeastern United States as well, a story that runs parallel to the Lusophone world of the Portuguese mill families of Fall River. The other great streams come from the wealthier, more cosmopolitan south and southeast: São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, the prosperous states of Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul.
Boca, with its investor edge, leans toward the latter. The entrepreneur arriving on a business visa is more likely to be a paulista or a carioca with capital and a company than a first-time labourer. But the city’s working Brazilian families, the ones who came up from Pompano, carry the full Brazilian map, mineiro and southern alike.
What unites them is the reason for leaving, which has rarely been hunger. Brazilians more often emigrate for stability: an escape from inflation and crime, a safer place to bank money and raise children, a US passport for the next generation.
Boca Raton Today
Brazilian Boca today is a community that has, on the whole, arrived. It is not visible the way it is in Pompano, where whole strip malls read in Portuguese. In Boca it is woven into a wealthy American city: a real-estate broker here, a surgeon there, a restaurant family, a software company with a São Paulo office and a Boca headquarters.
The infrastructure that supports it sits mostly along the city’s western edge, near State Road 7, where the butcher, the buffet and the churrascaria cluster within a few minutes of one another, and partly across the Broward line, where the larger churches and the festival live. A Boca Brazilian moves easily between the two worlds in a single weekend.
There are strains. National immigration enforcement has unsettled even established families in 2026, and the cost of Boca has always demanded that you keep succeeding to stay. But for the Brazilian who came to the United States to build something and protect it, Boca Raton remains the destination at the top of the road, the place you move to when the striving has paid off.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Brazilians live in Boca Raton?
There is no precise official count, but Portuguese speakers make up roughly 2.8 percent of Boca Raton’s residents, reflecting a substantial Brazilian presence. The Brazilians in Boca Raton are fewer than in the nearby Broward hubs but tend to be wealthier, with many professionals, business owners and investors.
Why did Brazilians settle in Boca Raton rather than Pompano or Deerfield Beach?
The earliest and densest Brazilian settlement in South Florida formed in northeastern Broward County, in Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach. As those families prospered, many moved north across the county line into Boca Raton for its schools and quieter streets, while a separate stream of Brazilian investors arrived directly with capital.
Where can I find Brazilian food and groceries in Boca Raton?
Most Brazilian businesses cluster along the city’s western edge near State Road 7. Boca Brazil Supermarket at 22819 State Road 7 has served the community for over fifteen years, and nearby Restaurante Brasil and Picanha Brazil offer buffet-style Brazilian dining and churrasco.
Is there a Brazilian church in Boca Raton?
Yes. New Hope Brazilian Baptist Church at 640 Hastings Street holds Portuguese-language services and has a sister congregation in Deerfield Beach. Several other South Florida churches also offer Portuguese translation, and the Brazilian evangelical church is often the first institution immigrant families join.
What part of Brazil do most Boca Raton Brazilians come from?
South Florida’s Brazilians come largely from the state of Minas Gerais and from the wealthier south and southeast, including São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul. Boca’s investor-heavy community leans toward the more affluent southern and southeastern states.
Is there a Brazilian festival near Boca Raton?
Yes. The Brazilian Festival of South Florida, founded in 2012 and held in Deerfield Beach, is billed as the largest Brazilian festival in the southeastern United States. Boca Raton families regularly drive south to the Broward shore each autumn to take part.
If your family’s story passed through Boca Raton, or any of the places Brazilians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the highlands of Minas Gerais or the avenues of São Paulo, to a butcher’s counter off State Road 7 and a tower downtown, to wherever you are now.