Phantom Holiday Town

Praia Grande, a twenty-kilometre bike ride from my flat, was once a small fishing village famous for its therapeutic iodine rich waters. It is now one of the biggest urbanised beach resorts in Brasil, a monument to feral real estate, and part of a linear city that extends for an absurd eighty kilometres all the way down the coast to Peruíbe. The majority of properties in the seemingly infinite line of apartment blocks were bought as holiday home investments, and during the summer, an estimated two million tourists descend on the ecologically fragile area in an orgy of mass consumption that stretches local infrastructure to breaking point. I rather like the ghostly atmosphere of seaside towns in winter, the padlocked deckchairs, shuttered ice cream kiosks, upturned boats, and the chilled winds that have replaced the stifling aroma of chip fat, but on a wet, grey weekday, there is little to redeem Praia Grande that is bereft of wintry charm and utterly relentless in its ugly bleakness. The sales pitch hoarding propaganda would have you believe otherwise. ‘Infinite possibilities…you can have it all …your family will love it,’ and other vapid semiliterate promises that are characteristic of property speculation in which construction quality and social and environmental concerns are sacrificed for fast profits. I continue cycling along the promenade and begin to feel that I am in a dead zone where nothing lives and nothing has ever been. There is no historic centre. No picturesque, bar filled cobbled square, not even a colonial era church. In fact, there is no history to speak of at all. Just tower upon tower upon tower, many of them abandoned, many of them boarded up, architectural phantoms that speak of overproduction, saturated markets, bankruptcy, illegal construction and money laundering.