Since Brazil is a continent-sized country, it has three time zones, called fusos horários in Portuguese.

– Horário de Brasília (Brasília time, or BRT): Most of the states in the country fall in this time zone featured in yellow in the diagram. During much of the year, this time zone is one hour ahead of U.S. East Coast EST time. During the summer, it has an horário de verão. The summer time zone is 3 hours ahead of EST time.

–Horário de Amazonas (Amazon Standard Time, or AMT): This time zone encompasses six states in Brazil’s western region, pictured in green. This also has an horário de verão in the summer. This time zone is one hour behind BRT time.

–Horário de Fernando de Noronha (Fernando de Noronha Archipelago Time, or FNT): This time zone includes several islands off the coast of Brazil including Fernando de Noronha, and is one hour ahead of BRT time. There’s no summer time zone here.

Interestingly, there used to be four time zones in Brazil, with a fourth time zone in the far west of Brazil. The Brazilian government eliminated the fourth time zone in 2008.

Another interesting thing to note: the state of Bahia recently cancelled the horário de verão for two years. So right now, the whole state is one hour behind BRT time and is two hours ahead of EST time.