Brazil Travel Blog

You might think it’s an optical illusion but the fact is that a sizeable number of tower blocks on Santos’ beachfront are anything but straight. Take an unstable soil and add a pinch of property developer’s negligence and you end up with nearly one hundred buildings that in some cases are leaning even more than the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In actual fact, Italian specialists that worked on the Tower of Pisa were brought in to help secure the buildings in Santos.

The apartments are inhabited and structural engineers give assurances that the blocks are not going to collapse. I wouldn’t spend a night in one of those apartments!

One popular urban legend in Santos goes on saying that the collapse of a building would trigger the domino effect, giving a completely new visual (building-free) to Santos beachfront. Specialists deny such catastrophe could ever happen, as the buildings tend to collapse vertically.

Spectacular sunrise today - actually, less than an hour ago. With the end of the rainy season, magnificent sunrises become more of a common occurrence in São Paulo - during summer chances are the sky will be all covered with clouds. Mind you, you have to get up early to enjoy nature’s show (the photos were taken at 6:10 am).

Oh, how I love going to the sacolão (the greengrocer’s)! There are always plenty of photo opportunities and, if that wasn’t sufficient enough, hardly a visit goes by without the discovery of a new and strange variety of fruit (and believe me, there are far more exotic varieties of fruits and vegetables than the yam shown on the following photograph).

Last Sunday the guys at the greengrocer’s had piled up a phenomenal amount of oranges, on an obvious attempt at defying gravity. Actually, the sacolão has all to do with masses of piled fruits, everywhere. Do not miss the chance to visit a sacolão during your stay in Brazil.

Even in the tiniest of places, and Caraíva is a small village indeed (population: 1,500), you will find a chapel or a church, often painted in bright colours, to remind you of the importance in the daily life of Brazilians of the ever present Christian churches.

A romantinc candlelit dinner in the main square of a tiny village where there is no street lightning? That will be ultra-charming Trancoso, in the southern coast of the state of Bahia.

Come the end of the day, everyone comes together in the Quadrado, the main square of the village.

All along the Brazilian coast, from the wild north and the never ending waves of the pororoca in the Amazon, to the southernmost point of the Brazilian coast, near the border with Uruguay, surfing is an essential part of many young people’s lives.

Doesn’t matter where, it’s surfers coming and surfers going. I’m not a surfing person myself, but do I not enjoying watching surfers ride the waves!

I have put together five photo albums from our recent trip to Florianópolis. They can be seen at my Flickr page.

The first album is dedicated to the north of the island, with photos of Santo Antônio de Lisboa, the Projeto Tamar in Barra da Lagoa, and the beaches of Jurerê, Canasvieiras, Ingleses, Brava and Santinho.

The second album is dedicated to the centre and the Lagoa da Conceição, with photos of the Mercado Municipal, of the Lagoa and of the Mole beach.

The third album is dedicated to the south of the island, with photos of Armação, Ribeirão da Ilha and Pântano do Sul.

The fourth álbum is dedicated to the Campeche beach and the idyllic Campeche island.

An the fifth and final album is dedicated to the Joaquina dunes and its sandboard artists.

Yes, the Brazil Travel Blog is one year old today. During that time, we’ve seen 326 posts about Brazil, and the pages of the blog have been loaded 75,749 times by 31,609 unique visitors.

The photograph I’ve chosen for today has everything to do with football-crazy Brazil. There is no such thing as a bad place to play football. Even if it’s only a minute sand bar and the tide is rising.

Thanks to all the blog readers for sharing this journey with me.

Taken from home, at the end of the day. In São Paulo you only need to look up in the sky to forget about car congestion and the concrete jungle.

The Instituto Butantan in São Paulo is a biomedical research center with a worldwide reputation for its work on the development of snake antivenom. A small colection of live snakes can be seen at its Biological Museum.