Groundbreaking Ceremony Held for Natal Brazil Temple 

On Saturday, May 17, 2025, religious and government leaders and of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gathered for the groundbreaking ceremony of the Natal Brazil Temple. This will be the 15th temple in Brazil.

“We thank the leaders of the Church in this region for their leadership and faith, and all the and missionaries who worked to establish The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Natal,” said Elder Mark D. Eddy, Second Counselor in the Brazil Area Presidency, with a heart full of joy and gratitude.

Presided over by Elder Eddy and conducted by Elder Sankari, an Area Seventy, the ceremony featured remarks from 10-year-old Larissa Silva de Oliveira, 17-year-old Maria Eduarda Gomes da Silva, and Antonio Carlos Bastos Ferreira, a pioneer of the Church in the region. He recalled:

“In July 1978, at my father’s house, with just a few brothers and sisters, President Max L. Shirts dedicated the Natal area for the preaching of the gospel in Rio Grande do Norte,” he ed.

“Here today begins the greatest spiritual transformation this city has ever seen,” he said.

Elder Mark D. Eddy gave the closing address and offered the dedicatory prayer for the land — a deeply emotional moment for the approximately 500 present and the thousands who watched the ceremony via YouTube.

“On this groundbreaking day, we recognize the need to prepare ourselves to enter the house of the Lord that will be dedicated here,” Elder Eddy said in his dedicatory prayer. “We humbly plead with Thee to increase our desire to be personally prepared to receive this temple. We also ask Thee to increase our capacity to be instruments in Thy hands as we help others prepare to receive this house of the Lord.”

About the Natal Brazil Temple

President Russell M. Nelson announced a temple for Natal during the April 2023 general conference, along with the announcement of the Teresina Temple in Piauí, Brazil.

The Natal Brazil Temple will be built on a 5.53-acre site located on Av. Senador Salgado Filho in the Nova Parnamirim neighborhood of Parnamirim, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. Plans call for a single-story temple of approximately 19,800 square feet. This will be the first temple in Rio Grande do Norte, a state on Brazil’s easternmost Atlantic coast.

About 1.5 million Latter-day Saints live in Brazil, spread across more than 2,073 congregations. Missionary work and Church operations date back to 1928. The first stake (a collection of several congregations) in South America was created in São Paulo in 1966. Twelve years later, the first temple in South America was also dedicated in São Paulo in 1978.

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Brazil has 24 temples that are either dedicated, under construction, or announced, the most recently dedicated being the Salvador Brazil Temple on October 20, 2024.

The currently dedicated and operating temples in Brazil are located in Belém, Brasília, Campinas, Curitiba, Fortaleza, Manaus, Porto Alegre, Recife, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and São Paulo.

In addition to the Natal temple, three other houses of the Lord are under construction in Brazil: Belo Horizonte, Ribeirão Preto, and Londrina.

Nine temples are currently in the planning and design phase in Brazil: Florianópolis, Goiânia, João Pessoa, Maceió, Santos, São Paulo East, Teresina, Vitória, and Campo Grande.