Bismuth vanadate (BiVO 4 ) is a chemically stable and nontoxic semiconductor (SC) photocatalyst that can absorb visible light to degrade most of pollutants in aqueous solution due to suitable band-gap energy (ca. 2.4eV), but it usually shows a low activity in its pristine form owing to poor charge-separation characteristics and the weak surface adsorption properties. In this paper, we demonstrated that the photocatalytic activity of BiVO 4 can be greatly enhanced by surface modification with Cu 2 O nanoparticles through polyol reduction method. The modified photocatalysts (Cu 2 O/BiVO 4 ) with proper loading amount of Cu 2 O (0.75wt%) showed the highest photocatalytic degradation activity for methylene blue (MB) degradation with the pseudo-first-order rate constant k app and degradation efficiency two times higher than pristine BiVO 4 under visible light and solar light irradiation. The characterizations of resulting photocatalysts revealed that decoration of Cu 2 O nanoparticles led to the formation of a p-n heterojunction at the contact interface of Cu 2 O and BiVO 4 , which narrowed the band gap of BiVO 4 for extending the absorption range of visible light and promoted the charge transfer across interface for suppressing the recombination of photogenerated electron–hole pairs, thus improving the catalytic performance of photocatalysts. This work demonstrates that the structural integration of p-type Cu 2 O SC with n-type BiVO 4 SC will be a new promising strategy to develop a high-efficient heterojunction photocatalyst for visible-light-driven degradation of pollutants.