Belém/Val-de-Cans International Airport
Aairport in Belém, Pará, Brazil
Val-de-Cans/Júlio Cezar Ribeiro International Airport (IATA: BEL, ICAO: SBBE), operated by Norte da Amazônia, and located 12 km (7 mi) from downtown, is the main airport serving Belém, Brazil. Val de Cans (sometimes spelled Val de Cães) is the name of the neighborhood where the airport is located. On 13 April 2010, the airport was named after Júlio Cezar Ribeiro de Souza (1837–1887), a researcher of balloons.
The airport is operated by Consortium Novo Norte (NOA).
Some of its facilities are shared with Belém Air Force Base of the Brazilian Air Force.
History
In 1934, General Eurico Gaspar Dutra, then the Director of Military Aviation, appointed Lieutenant Armando Sierra de Menezes to choose a site in Val de Cans where an airport was to be built. The Directorate of Civil Aeronautics, an agency of the Ministry of Traffic and Public Works, would be in charge of the project. Val de Cans began its history as a land track running along the east–west axis with 1,200m. The facility comprised a courtyard, a hangar, and a parking structure of concrete for military aircraft, which later became known as "Yellow Hangar."
With the outbreak of World War II, airbases and airports located on the Brazilian coast became immensely important in the support of transportation of aircraft, personnel, and equipment across the South Atlantic Ocean to Sierra Leone in West Africa. These facilities provided the necessary logistical support for the thousands of planes that, manufactured in Canada and the United States, were moved to North Africa and Europe.
The public source identifies “Belém/Val-de-Cans International Airport” as aairport in Belém, Pará, Brazil. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Belém, Val-de-Cans and International.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q762986. Authority coordinates are -1.385, -48.479. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2010, 1837, 1887 and 1934.
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This entry incorporates text from “Belém/Val-de-Cans International Airport” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.