In Europe (or at least a good part of it) vacation is "spent" only on workdays, not weekends or holidays (which is fairer, you wouldn't be working on these days).
So in Sweden, where you get 25 days compared to Brazil's 30, you actually get roughly one week more vacation per year. This is not evident at a first glance just by comparing numbers.
In practice it really depends where you work.
In some jobs you will have a lot of latitude, and the employer will let you freely choose and only veto it if it's really disruptive (like everybody else in the team leaving at the same time). This is what I had experienced, working in IT.
I suspect that in some lines of work, like the service industry, you might be totally out of luck and have zero choice on the matter.