Roofing in Brazil

Brazil's roofing reflects Indigenous building traditions, a Portuguese colonial heritage of curved clay tiles, a mostly tropical and subtropical climate with heavy seasonal rain and strong sun, and a vast stock of self-built urban housing. Today almost every Brazilian home is covered by tiles or roofing sheets (telhas), a concrete slab (laje) or both.¹ In Portuguese a roof is a telhado or cobertura, and a tile or roofing sheet is a telha.¹ Brazil mined chrysotile asbestos and used it widely in fibre-cement roofing until its Supreme Federal Court banned it in 2017.²

Climate and hazards

Most of Brazil has heavy tropical or subtropical rainfall and intense sun, conditions that favoured wide overhanging eaves to protect earth walls in the colonial period and still shape roof design.⁵ Wind loads are calculated under the national standard NBR 6123 and rainwater drainage under NBR 10844, both referenced by the national performance standard for roofing systems.⁷ Seismic hazard is low in most of the country, with ground acceleration near zero in the east, and seismic design is covered by NBR 15421 (2006).¹⁴

Roofing history

Indigenous roofs

Before colonisation, Indigenous peoples built houses of timber and palm or grass thatch. In the far north, the Yanomami still build the shabono, a ring of palm-thatched lean-to roofs around an open central plaza,¹² and Tukanoan peoples of the north-west Amazon build malocas, large communal houses roofed with palm thatch.¹³

Colonial period (1500–1822)

In the first decades of colonisation, houses were simply roofed with straw (sapé), resembling Indigenous ocas and certain African-influenced dwellings still seen in rural areas.⁵ Early civil buildings also used rammed earth with straw roofing, and the rural houses of free men had straw roofs over wattle-and-daub walls.⁵ Ceramic roof tiles were used first on wealthier buildings before becoming common, and later houses of adobe or stone masonry were generally tiled.⁵

Walls of rammed earth (taipa de pilão), stone masonry or wattle and daub (pau a pique) were protected from rain by wide eaves, whose rafter ends were often carved into decorative modillions.⁵ Roofs were framed with various timber trusses, sometimes with additional rafters, and ceilings were usually flat.⁵ Shed roofs covered ranch buildings and kitchens, gable roofs were very common in towns, and hipped roofs were used on larger buildings such as townhouses, pavilions and public buildings.⁵ Some multi-storey townhouses (sobrados) had gently curved roofs with pointed tiles at the corners; noble sobrados of the late 17th and early 18th centuries include the Arcebispos House in Salvador, built 1707–1715.⁵

Three main clay tile types became established: the curved canal or colonial tile, the French (Marseille, marselha) tile and the Roman tile.⁵

Jesuit-Guaraní missions

In the Jesuit missions of the Guaraní, which spread across what are now southern Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay in the 17th and 18th centuries, clay tiles replaced thatch largely because of the risk of fire.⁸⁹ Tile roofs spread during a second phase of construction between about 1641 and 1695, the earliest documentary reference to tiles for the missions dates from 1714, and between 1722 and 1726 each mission was ordered to set up its own tile workshop.⁸ Tiles were moulded from clay trodden by cattle, dried on wooden racks and fired slowly for about three days and nights; one Jesuit built three kilns each holding about 4,000 tiles.⁸ Tiles from San Ignacio Miní measure about 46–55 cm (18–22 in) long, 19–22 cm (7.5–8.7 in) wide and 1 cm (0.4 in) thick, and at Santa Ana only the church had decorated tiles: 87% of the fragments show a half-moon motif, almost all were found inside the church, and 73% bear signs of burning linked to the mission's destruction by Paraguayan troops.⁸ The regular placement of the borders suggests the tiles were made in moulds.⁸ The ruins of São Miguel Arcanjo in Rio Grande do Sul form part of the Jesuit Missions of the Guaranis World Heritage property shared with Argentina; Brazil's national heritage institute IPHAN protected them in 1938.⁹

Industrial era

French-pattern interlocking tiles came into common use alongside the colonial tile.⁵ In 1940 Eternit began making fibre-cement products in Brazil, and corrugated fibre-cement sheet became a common low-cost roof on houses, farm buildings and industrial sheds.¹¹ For decades much of this sheet was made with chrysotile asbestos.²⁴

The asbestos ban

On 29 November 2017, the Supreme Federal Court (STF) declared unconstitutional, by seven votes to two in cases ADI 3406 and ADI 3470, Article 2 of Federal Law 9.055/1995, which had allowed the extraction, processing, sale and distribution of chrysotile asbestos.² The ruling, reported by Justice Rosa Weber, is binding on everyone and prevents Congress from reinstating chrysotile use in substantially the same form.²

Mining continued for export at Minaçu in northern Goiás, where Eternit's subsidiary SAMA operated under Goiás State Law 20.514/2019; on 19 August 2021 Eternit was notified of a court order from Uruaçu, sought by federal prosecutors (MPF), requiring the immediate suspension of chrysotile extraction, and the company announced the halt the next day.³ Eternit, which entered judicial recovery in the late 2010s, divested its asbestos business and refocused on roof tiles.⁴

Roofing today

What Brazilian homes are covered with

IBGE's Continuous National Household Sample Survey (PNAD Contínua) for 2019 recorded the predominant roof covering of Brazilian homes as:¹

Covering	Share of homes	Homes
Tiles or sheets without a concrete slab (telha sem laje)	49.8%	36.0 million
Tiles or sheets over a concrete slab (telha com laje)	32.1%	23.2 million
Concrete slab only (somente laje)	15.5%	11.2 million
Other materials	2.6%	1.9 million

Homes covered only by a concrete slab showed the largest increase, rising from 14.7% in 2018, or about 817,000 more homes.¹ There are strong regional differences. The South-east is the only region where tiles over a slab (48.6%) outnumber tiles without one, and it also has the highest share of slab-only roofs (26.0%); in the North, tiles without a slab cover 79.6% of homes, and 9.7% use other materials, far above the national average.¹

The laje

Nearly half of Brazilian homes have a concrete slab as part of their roof, either alone or under tiles or sheets, and the slab-only share is growing fastest.¹ Many houses combine a slab ceiling with a tiled or sheeted pitched roof above, a combination counted separately in national statistics.¹

Clay and concrete tiles

Clay tiles in colonial, Roman, French and other patterns remain the traditional pitched-roof covering, and concrete tiles are also produced; Eternit, for example, sells a concrete tile alongside fibre-cement sheet.⁵¹¹

Fibre-cement sheet

Asbestos-free fibre-cement sheet, reinforced with synthetic fibres such as polypropylene, is now made to NBR 15210 and installed according to NBR 7196.⁶ Typical products from one major manufacturer illustrate the range:⁶

Product	Thickness	Typical lengths	Minimum slope	Maximum span between supports
Small corrugated sheet (Fibrotex/Ondina)	4 mm (0.16 in)	1.22–2.44 m (4–8 ft)	15° (27%)	1.10 m (3.6 ft)
Large corrugated sheet, 5 mm	5 mm (0.20 in)	1.22–3.66 m (4–12 ft)	10° (17.6%)	1.69 m (5.5 ft)
Large corrugated sheet, 6–8 mm	6–8 mm (0.24–0.31 in)	1.22–3.66 m (4–12 ft)	5° (8.7%)	1.69–1.99 m (5.5–6.5 ft)

For 6 and 8 mm sheets the manufacturer recommends a slope of 15° (27%), although they may be laid as low as 5° with extra care below 10°.⁶ Large corrugated sheets weigh about 16 kg/m² at 5 mm, 18 kg/m² at 6 mm and 24 kg/m² at 8 mm (3.3–4.9 lb/sq ft) for load calculations, including absorbed water, overlaps and fixings.⁶ End laps range from 140 mm (5.5 in) on slopes of 15° or more to 250 mm (9.8 in) between 5° and 10°, or 140 mm with a sealing cord on low slopes.⁶ Side laps on large sheets are a quarter wave, about 50 mm (2 in), or one and a quarter waves, about 230 mm (9 in), on 6 and 8 mm sheets.⁶ Small corrugated sheets have a side lap of 56 mm (2.2 in) and end laps of 140–300 mm (5.5–12 in), and some are made for slopes from 15° up to 30° (58%).⁶ Manufacturers refer to the national bioclimatic zones of NBR 15220-3 when recommending products, and roofs over lower slopes need particular care at laps and fixings.⁶

Building a typical tiled roof

A typical pitched roof in Brazil follows the colonial pattern in structure: timber trusses or rafters carrying battens, with the eaves projecting well beyond the walls.⁵ Over the timber, clay or concrete tiles are hung in courses from eaves to ridge, while fibre-cement and metal sheets are fixed directly to purlins at the spans given by the manufacturer.⁶ Since 2013, the performance of the complete roofing system in housing, rather than each product alone, has been assessed against NBR 15575-5.⁷

Solar tiles

Eternit registered a concrete solar tile in 2019 and developed a fibre-cement solar tile rated at 142 Wp per unit, with four to six tiles estimated to supply a small house; a pilot with the NGO Revolusolar targeted homes in the Chapéu Mangueira, Babilônia and Ladeira Ari Barroso communities of Rio de Janeiro.⁴

Codes and standards

Technical standards are issued by the Brazilian Association of Technical Standards (ABNT) as NBR standards. Key roofing standards include:

• NBR 15575-5: performance requirements for roofing systems in residential buildings, first issued in 2013, revised in 2021 and reissued in December 2025.⁷
• NBR 15210-1 and -2: corrugated fibre-cement sheets and accessories.⁶
• NBR 7196: design and fixing of fibre-cement roofs.⁶
• NBR 6123: wind loads; NBR 10844: rainwater drainage.⁷
• NBR 15421 (2006): seismic design.¹⁴

Notable roofs and places

• Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais: the first Brazilian cultural property on the World Heritage List, inscribed on 5 September 1980, with Baroque churches, public buildings and houses that keep their original facades.¹⁰ Its churches contain sculpture by Antônio Francisco Lisboa, known as Aleijadinho, regarded as the greatest artist of colonial Brazil.¹⁰
• São Miguel das Missões, Rio Grande do Sul: ruins of a Jesuit-Guaraní mission church.⁹
• Salvador, Bahia: colonial sobrados including the Arcebispos House (1707–1715).⁵

Slate

Brazil is the world's second-largest slate producer, and Papagaios in Minas Gerais accounts for about 95% of national output; not all Brazilian slate products qualify for the European CE mark for roofing slate.¹⁵

Local roofing terms

• Telhado, cobertura: roof.¹
• Telha: tile or roofing sheet; telha colonial, capa-canal: curved channel-and-cover clay tile.⁵
• Telha francesa, marselha: French-pattern interlocking tile.⁵
• Laje: concrete slab.¹
• Beiral: eave.⁵
• Fibrocimento: fibre-cement.⁶
• Sapé: grass thatch.⁵
• Taipa de pilão: rammed earth; pau a pique: wattle and daub.⁵