Map - Cândido Godói (Cândido Godói)

Cândido Godói is a municipality of 6,151 inhabitants in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil near the Argentine border, famous for the high number of twins born there. The twin phenomenon is centered in Linha São Pedro, a small settlement in the city of Cândido Godói, in an ethnically homogeneous population of German descent.

The rate of twin births in Cândido Godói is 10%, significantly higher than the overall 1.8% rate for the state of Rio Grande do Sul. This rate is unusual, exceeding the highest observed national twinning rate (4.5 to 5% for southwestern Nigeria ). Nearly half (8 of 17) of twins examined in one study were monozygotic (identical) twins, a few more than the average of 30%. Twin births were noted from the early twentieth century, when the first immigrants included seventeen sets of twins, and have been observed through several generations in the latter part of the twentieth century.

The population is largely of Polish or German ancestry, with many tracing ancestry to the Hunsrück region of Germany, which has a higher than average twinning rate. The rate in Cândido Godói could reflect genetic founder effect: rare genetic traits occurring by chance among a small group founding a community will be more common among their descendants than in the population at large.