Moving and building a house: Curitiba/Sao Jose dos Pinhais area

Hi guys,

I haven't been checking into the Forum for quite a while as I forgot my password so please forgive me for suddenly popping up and asking for information!

Anyway, the story is that I am currently living in Goias with my Brazilian husband, son and two dogs. It's not working out for us here (so many reasons not limited to the heatwave of 42 degrees we had until recently!!) and so we are planning to sell up (we have a farm) and move south. We'd like to move to a rural area about 45 minutes drive or so from Curitiba, so we had been looking at SJP, Bocaiuva do Sul, Colombo amongst other areas. We would like to buy land with maybe five acres and build a house.

I suppose I am looking for any general information or feedback from folks already living there but one of my big questions is more specific: does anybody know anything about planning permission in Curitiba and surrounding areas? We didn't encounter it where we currently live because we built on our farm, but I'm sure it'll be a requirement and I suppose I'm just wondering if it's a lengthy process, is it expensive, just any info at all - even if someone can tell me what office I even need to contact as I checked on Google and couldn't find anything relating to planning permission so I don't even know what government dept deals with it!

Has anybody gone through this before, any tips?

We're planning to take a trip down to check the place out as soon as we can but I'm impatient to get some research done first!

Thankyou in advance! (Also, not sure what category to put this in so I've left it blank)