Gabriel Silveirado: Building an Independent Travel and Culture Publisher from São Paulo

Travel journalism has a credibility problem. Much of what is published about hotels, yachts and grand houses reads as an extension of the brochure. Gabriel Silveirado has spent more than a decade building a publication that tries to do something harder: use access to remarkable places as the starting point for a question, not the end of the story. He is the founder and publisher of WAYFARER Group, and a nominee for Founder of the Year at the TPC Awards 2026.

An independent operation from São Paulo

Silveirado founded the publishing operation in São Paulo in 2013. It began with WAYFARER Brasil, the original Portuguese-language platform, and has grown into a small group. Alongside the Brazilian title sit WAYFARER Edition, an English-language publication, and WAYFARER Agency, a travel and experiences division.

The Edition is produced by an editorial team working from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, with contributors in Brazil and abroad, and lists a New York address. Its subjects are chosen on the strength of the story and the perspective brought to it, rather than on nationality or location. For an independent publisher, that is a deliberate choice: it puts a Brazilian editorial outlook into conversation with an international audience rather than translating itself to fit one.

Access as a starting point

Silveirado writes and conducts many of the Edition's portraits himself. His beat runs across motor racing, automotive design, watchmaking and hospitality, and he works mainly through interviews, reported journeys and portraits. His published work includes conversations with Formula 1 driver Charles Leclerc at Interlagos and with Lamborghini's Rouven Mohr at Pebble Beach, alongside coverage from Monaco, Paris Fashion Week and international hospitality. He also profiled Shirish Saraf and the Kalizma, boarding at Saraf's invitation for a journey along the Montenegrin coast. The interview was conducted with Amanda Ford, with photography by Anna Sereda.

The founder page sets out the principle behind this work: a famous name can provide the setting, but the substance has to come from the conversation itself.

Hospitality with its history attached

Two recent Edition pieces show the approach in practice. At Mamula Island, a nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian fort at the entrance to Montenegro's Bay of Kotor that now operates as a hotel, Silveirado's reporting keeps the site's Second World War history as an internment camp in view. The piece argues that restoring a building and remembering what happened inside it are separate responsibilities, and that the first does not settle the second.

At Hope Lodge, a restored nineteenth-century sporting lodge in Sutherland in the Scottish Highlands, the same instinct appears in a different form. The article describes the restoration and the estate's long-term conservation plans, but treats those plans as ambitions still to be proven, and places the landscape in the context of the Highland Clearances.

In a category of journalism often accused of deference, that measured distance is the point. It is what Silveirado has spent thirteen years building into the publication's voice, and it is the basis of his nomination.

More about his work is on his founder page at WAYFARER Edition.

Gabriel Silveirado is a nominee in the Founder of the Year category of the TPC Awards 2026. Details are drawn from WAYFARER Edition's public founder page, masthead and published articles.