The First Presidency has announced an Aug. 1 groundbreaking date for the Santos Brazil Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Presiding over the Saturday ceremony will be Elder Ronald M. Barcellos — a General Authority Seventy who will then be serving as a counselor in the Brazil Area presidency. Elder Barcellos was born in São Paulo, Brazil, about a 50-mile drive from Santos.
In a May 26 news release, information about this upcoming groundbreaking was published on ChurchofJesusChrist.org.
This will be the third temple groundbreaking in Brazil this year — following the João Pessoa temple event on Jan. 24 and the one for Teresina temple on April 18.
About the Santos temple and Church in Brazil
As previously announced, the Santos temple is planned as a two-story building of approximately 23,000 square feet. It will be built at Avenida Doutor Waldemar Leão, 305, Jabaquara, Santos, in the state of São Paulo.
On April 3, 2022, then-Church President Russell M. Nelson announced this temple for Santos. It was one of 17 temple locations he identified in that general conference, including another for Brazil, in Maceió.
Latter-day Saint missionaries began preaching in southern Brazil in 1928. By the time the São Paulo Brazil Temple — the first in South America — was dedicated in 1978, membership in the country had reached 54,000.
Home now to more than 1.5 million Latter-day Saints in over 2,000 wards and branches, Brazil has 24 temples in various stages of operation, construction and planning.
The country’s 11 operating temples include the São Paulo (dedicated in 1978), Recife (2000), Porto Alegre (2000), Campinas (2002), Curitiba (2008), Manaus (2012), Fortaleza (2019), Rio de Janeiro (2022), Belém (2022), Brasília (2023) and Salvador (2024) temples.
Another six houses of the Lord are under construction in Brazil, including the Belo Horizonte (since 2023), Ribeirão Preto (2024), Londrina (2024), Natal (2025), João Pessoa (January 2026) and Teresina (April 2026) temples.
That leaves seven temples in planning and design stages, for São Paulo East (announced 2020), Vitória (2021), Maceió (2022), Santos (2022), Goiânia (2023), Florianópolis (2024) and Campo Grande (2025).
