Portuguese 
English 
Spanish 
5 min of reading 
0 comments 
Zelide Vedovatto, Nona Zelide, worked in agriculture until she was 70 and became an influencer at 83 with 23.5 thousand followers in Nova Erechim, a city of 5.4 thousand inhabitants in Western SC, where she rides her scooter and conquers the internet with typical recipes, Italian dialect, and spontaneous outings.
A farmer who spent her entire life working in agriculture became an influencer in a city of just over 5,000 inhabitants in Western Santa Catarina, and the story of how it happened is as unlikely as it is charming. Zelide Vedovatto, a resident of Nova Erechim, accumulated 23.5 thousand followers on social media as Nona Zelide, the influencer grandma who conquered the internet with spontaneous videos recorded by a grandson who started filming his grandmother’s daily life as a joke and ended up creating a digital phenomenon that surpassed the entire population of her city by four times. “I never thought about it. One of my grandsons took some pictures of me, and we got excited just because of that,” says the influencer who left the countryside after health problems and found an audience on the internet that farming never offered.
The scooter Zelide uses to get around the streets of Nova Erechim has become as important a character in the videos as the influencer herself. “I’ve had the scooter for six years and I ride all over the city. Since it’s a small town here, it’s very peaceful. I’ve never driven any car, and the scooter is very easy to drive,” reports Nona Zelide, for whom the rides represent more than just getting around: “When we take a spin, it gives a feeling of freedom.” The image of an elderly woman riding her scooter through quiet streets in rural Santa Catarina is the kind of scene that generates immediate identification in those who grew up in a small town and nostalgia in those who left.
How a farmer from Western SC became an influencer
Zelide’s journey to becoming an influencer did not follow a planned script. The farmer worked in agriculture for most of her life and only left the countryside at 70 when health problems, including osteoarthritis that still causes her knee pain, made rural activity unsustainable. The move to the urban area of Nova Erechim could have meant a quiet retirement like so many others in rural Santa Catarina, but a grandson with a cell phone and a good sense of humor transformed his grandmother’s daily life into content that the internet embraced.
-
Goodbye to the picture above the headboard: the 2026 European trend focuses on smart walls with slatted panels, offering up to 30% noise reduction, up to 40% visual gain in spaciousness, and solutions that hide wires and integrate indirect lighting.
-
End of an era: Coca-Cola announces end of production in Brazil and reduction worldwide
-
A R$ 24 dish stalled Havan’s colossal project for 150 days in Rio Grande and blocked an investment of about R$ 100 million after an unexpected discovery on the site generated mystery, controversy, and questions about what really happened.
-
Forget the transparent shower enclosure: a new style is set to grow in 2026 to visually enlarge the bathroom by up to 2x, increase privacy, and reduce water marks.
The process was organic and unpretentious. The first videos showed simple scenes from the influencer’s daily life: recipes for pudding, baked sweet potato, and polenta prepared the way generations of Italian-Brazilian families learned, scooter rides through the quiet streets of Nova Erechim, and conversations where the Italian dialect from the colonization of Western Santa Catarina seasoned every phrase. The public recognized something in those videos that social media algorithms cannot manufacture: authenticity, and Nona Zelide became an influencer without needing to study trends, edit thumbnails, or calculate posting times.
Why the influencer’s videos captivate so many people
Nona Zelide’s secret as an influencer is precisely that she has no secret. The spontaneity with which she speaks, cooks, and rides her scooter conveys a simplicity that acts as an antidote to the polished and artificial content dominating social media, and followers respond with genuine engagement that professional influencers spend fortunes trying to replicate. When Zelide shows polenta made on a wood-burning stove or a sweet potato baked over embers, she isn’t creating gastronomic content: she’s sharing an emotional memory that connects thousands of people to their own grandmothers and the kitchens where they grew up.
The influencer’s natural humor complements her simplicity. Zelide uses Italian expressions and dialects that are a strong mark of the colonization of western Santa Catarina, and the way she mixes Portuguese and Italian in everyday phrases amuses followers who recognize the voice of their own families in her speech. In one of her most popular videos, the influencer showed that her little scooter can even tackle hills without difficulty, demonstrating that her adventurous spirit hasn’t diminished, it just changed address: it left the farm and went to the streets of Nova Erechim.
What changed in the influencer’s life after digital fame
The repercussion brought moments that moved Zelide. The comedian Badin O Colono, whose content the influencer followed as a viewer, shared a video of her with his audience, a recognition that for a lady in a city of 5,000 inhabitants carries a weight that viewership numbers cannot measure. Another milestone was the first advertisement made on social media: Nona Zelide said she was emotional to see the “little money” fall into her account, an experience that for someone who worked decades in agriculture gains special meaning because it demonstrates that the value she offers to the world no longer depends on physical effort.
Despite the fame, the influencer guarantees that nothing has changed in her essence. “Some people call me famous and ask to take pictures, but it’s all a joke. I’m the same,” says Zelide, a statement that followers confirm by watching videos where her routine remains simple: the same little scooter, the same streets, the same recipes, and the same way of speaking that won over 23.5 thousand people. The recordings happen “when we can, in the free time we have,” without an editorial calendar, without a production team, and without the pressure for metrics that consumes conventional influencers.
What Nona Zelide represents for Nova Erechim and Western SC
For a city of 5,400 inhabitants, having an influencer with 23.5 thousand followers is a phenomenon that puts Nova Erechim on the digital map in a way no institutional campaign could. Each video of Nona Zelide shows quiet streets, rural landscapes, and an interior lifestyle that functions as involuntary advertising for the municipality and the region, content that potential tourists and people tired of big cities watch with interest that goes beyond entertainment. The influencer is an unofficial ambassador of a lifestyle that western Santa Catarina offers and that social media helps to disseminate to an audience that would never hear of Nova Erechim through other means.
Zelide also represents something greater than follower numbers. The influencer proves that age is not a limit to relevance, that simplicity can compete with professional production, and that life in the interior of Santa Catarina has value that the internet recognizes when someone authentic decides to share. With knee osteoarthritis and a little scooter as her companion, Nona Zelide does something that many people half her age cannot: she inspires people to leave home, take walks, and enjoy life regardless of the obstacles that time imposes.
And you, do you know any “nona” similar to Zelide? Do you think the interior of SC deserves more visibility on social media? Leave your opinion in the comments.
Be the first to react!