What Is VCP Airport? Viracopos, in Campinas, 95 km From São Paulo

IATA, the airlines' trade association, files VCP under the city name Sao Paulo, like Guarulhos and Congonhas, although the airport stands in another municipality. The GRU guide explains that naming and the area code SAO.

Where VCP is, and how far from São Paulo

DECEA, the air force department that publishes Brazil's aeronautical records, places SBKP 14 km south-southwest of central Campinas and tags it INTL, for international. Campinas city hall's visitor page gives two figures: 17 km to the center of Campinas and 95 km to the center of São Paulo.

Azul publishes a travel time: its timetable for the free bus between Viracopos and Congonhas, the airport inside the city of São Paulo, allows 90 to 100 minutes a trip, and the airport reprints it.

What flies from VCP

The operator's airline directory lists three passenger airlines: Azul, GOL and LATAM. The split is lopsided. In the movement data the airport files with ANAC, Azul flights carried 95.7% of VCP's 2025 passengers by our sum, GOL 3.1% and LATAM 1.0%. The departure board for September 28, 2026 listed 164 flights, 157 of them Azul's.

ANAC's register of flights flown, whose latest month is July 2026, shows the network. Azul flew from VCP to 60 other Brazilian airports and abroad to Lisbon, Porto, Madrid, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale, plus Bariloche and Mendoza in Argentina and a cargo run to Buenos Aires. GOL flew mostly to Rio de Janeiro's Galeão, Salvador and Brasília; LATAM, almost only to Brasília. Paris-Orly, whose flights carried 138,502 VCP passengers in 2025, does not appear in the July register.

Baggage allowances differ: GOL, LATAM and Azul publish different numbers.

Getting to São Paulo or Campinas

What the airport, the bus companies and Campinas publish, read on September 28, 2026:

Azul's bus has run only between Viracopos and Congonhas since August 1, 2024, every day. There are no reservations: you take a numbered ticket at Azul's counter, show a boarding pass and photo ID, and ride if there is room. Flying out, Azul asks you to pick a bus that arrives at least 60 minutes before a domestic flight.

The executive bus appears on the airport's transport page under VB Transportes and Lirabus. The two companies' transfer pages print timetables only for buses between central Campinas and Guarulhos or Congonhas.

City bus 1.93 costs R$ 6.00 on the Bilhete Único, Campinas's transit card, sold at a Lirabus store beside the international arrivals gate, or R$ 6.50 by QR code, the fares in force since January 1, 2026. EMDEC, the city's transport company, runs the line lookup where the airport sends you for times; it lists 45 weekday departures from the arrivals road toward the bus station, from 5:55 a.m. to 12:10 a.m., and 26 on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays, from 5:44 a.m. to 12:10 a.m.

Taxis work from two arrivals counters: Aerocoop, for regular taxis, from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., and an executive-taxi counter until 11:20 p.m. The airport does not say how its counters charge. EMDEC also publishes Campinas's meter: R$ 5.49 plus R$ 3.94 per km on weekdays from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. and on Saturdays until 2 p.m., R$ 5.12 at other times and on holidays, and 30% more for executive taxis. The directory lists no ride-app pickup point, and ride-app rules are written city by city.

No transport counter in the directory is open between 11:20 p.m. and 5:20 a.m. Once in São Paulo, paying for the metro as a visitor has its own catch.

Connecting at VCP: one terminal, the same bag rule

The operator's board files every flight, domestic and international, under Terminal 1, and ANAC's 2025 data put 99.8% of passengers there.

Arriving from abroad and flying on within Brazil, you still collect your bag, clear customs and check it in again. The cause is a national customs rule that grants automatic transit only to baggage continuing on an international journey, and the connection guide traces it at Guarulhos. What changes here is the walk: the domestic flight leaves from the same terminal.

At passport control, the automatic gates the operator announced in August 2026 take Brazilian citizens only; foreigners go to the Federal Police booths. There is no arrival card, customs has its own form, and a visa depends on your passport, with a separate rule for connections.

Changing airports is harder. The airport's transport page lists no bus to Guarulhos, Azul's bus stops at Congonhas, and Lirabus says it does not carry passengers between airports. Guarulhos has five published ways into the city of its own.

A concession that tried to end itself

Aeroportos Brasil Viracopos S.A. holds a 30-year federal concession, auctioned in February 2012 and in force since July 11 of that year; it took over operations in stages and has run the airport alone since February 14, 2013. In October 2017 ANAC opened a proceeding that can end in caducidade, forfeiture of the concession for default. The company filed for court-supervised reorganization in May 2018 and left it on December 10, 2020, after joining a relicitação, the federal procedure for handing a concession back to be auctioned again. Its 2020 amendment called that an amicable termination.

It never happened. The legal deadline to complete it passed, and in 2025 the Federal Court of Accounts (TCU) called ANAC's acting president to justify the loss. On November 15, 2025, ANAC's board ended the hand-back amendment, citing the unfeasibility of going on, and restored the original contract. The same day it created a settlement committee with the operator, the ports and airports ministry and federal attorneys; the TCU says that step suspended the forfeiture proceeding for now.

The operator's 2025 accounts, whose audit report is dated August 20, 2026, say the committee signed a final consensus report on June 8, 2026, agreeing on every relevant point but one, and that ANAC's board had yet to ratify it. On September 28, 2026, the Official Gazette carried no ANAC decision on it.

The company says the airport operates normally; its auditor flags a material uncertainty about the company's ability to continue as a going concern. Rio's Galeão also asked to hand its concession back; there, the hand-back gave way to an auction of the operator's shares in March 2026.

How busy VCP is, and how many only change planes

The operator counted 12,826,553 passengers in 2025, 1,109,617 of them international, a count that includes connections. Our sum of ANAC's movement data lands within 2 passengers of it and shows what kind of airport this is: 6.55 million of those boardings and disembarkations, 51%, were passengers changing planes. At Guarulhos, by the same data, it is about four in ten.

This year runs slightly behind. From January to August 2026 the operator reports 8,305,684 passengers, 1.6% fewer than a year earlier, with international traffic down 15.8%.

Sources

Accessed September 28, 2026.

• Aeroportos Brasil Viracopos — transport, the services and airline directories, read with JavaScript, the flight board, movement reports for 2025 and January to August 2026, the 2025 financial statements, notes 1 and 29, and the note on the automatic gates
• Azul — Ônibus Azul
• ANAC — the Viracopos concession, its amendments and Annex 12; the movement data, twelve 2025 files summed for SBKP; the July 2026 register of flights
• Official Gazette — ANAC Decision 726/2025 and Ordinance 18,266/2025, art. 9; TCU judgments 1461/2025 and 2733/2025
• DECEA — SBKP record. IATA — code search
• Campinas — city hall; Transurc fare history; EMDEC taxis and line lookup, searched for line 1.93
• Lirabus and VB Transportes transfer pages; Receita Federal, Normative Instruction 1,059/2010, art. 17

Method on how we research; Jeff Bruno writes from Curitiba. Next door: getting around, all guides.

What we could not verify

• The executive bus to São Paulo. The airport lists it without fare or timetable, and the Lirabus and VB transfer pages print schedules only for buses between central Campinas and Guarulhos or Congonhas.
• What a taxi to São Paulo costs. Neither the airport nor EMDEC publishes a fare for the trip, and a rate multiplied by a distance would be our arithmetic.
• Whether the 95 km is by road. Campinas city hall does not say, DECEA measures only from central Campinas, and the state highway department's route planner measures between cities, not to the airport.
• What the Viracopos settlement says. The ordinance that created the committee binds its members to a non-disclosure agreement. We found the final report described only in the operator's accounts, not in the Official Gazette or on ANAC's concession pages.