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 FORTALEZA is a sprawling city of over two million inhabitants, the centre literally bristling with offices and apartment blocks. It has, for well over a century, been the major commercial centre of the northern half of the Northeast. More recently it has poured resources into expanding its tourist trade, lining the fine city beaches with gleaming luxury hotels and developing the city centre. Taken together, this means that little trace remains of the city's eventful early history , the clue to which is in its name: Fortaleza means "fortress". The first Portuguese settlers arrived in 1603 and were defeated initially by the Indians, who killed and ate the first bishop (a distinction the city shares with Belém), and then by the Dutch, who drove the Portuguese out of the area in 1637 and built the Forte Schoonenborch. In fact the Portuguese were restricted to precarious coastal settlements until well into the eighteenth century, when the Indians were finally overwhelmed by the determined blazing of cattle trails into the interior. Another fort - the Fortaleza de Nossa Senhora da Assunção - was built by the Portuguese in 1816 on the site of the earlier Dutch one.
It was in Fortaleza that the independence movement in northern Brazil was organized, and it was one of the few places where the Portuguese actually made a fight of it, massacring the local patriots in 1824 before being massacred themselves a few months later. The city did well in the nineteenth century , as the port city of a hinterland where ranching was expanding rapidly. For decades, though, one of the city's most important exports was the people of the state: shipping lines transported flagelados wholesale from Fortaleza during drought years to the rubber zones of the Amazon and the cities of southern Brazil. These days, Fortaleza has something of the same atmosphere as Rio, especially when it comes to the good things in life. It's not a beautiful city but it has a safe, relaxed atmosphere, and the nightlife is superb.
The City
The only visible legacy of its crowded history in modern Fortaleza is the city's name, and a gridded street pattern laid out in the nineteenth century by a French architect, Adolphe Herbster. He was contracted by the ambitious city fathers to turn Fortaleza into "the Paris of the North" - you can only hope they got their money back.
The layout of the city is easy to grasp, despite its size. The centre , laid out in blocks, forms the commercial, administrative and religious heart, with markets, shops, public buildings, squares and a forbiddingly ugly concrete cathedral; it's quite possible to walk and take in most of the sights in one day, though you'd probably want to take longer. To the west of the centre, undistinguished urban sprawl finally gives way to the beaches of Barra do Ceará , but most of the action is to the east, where the main city beaches and the chic middle-class bairros of Praia de Iracema and Meireles are to be found, linked by the main seafront road, Avenida Presidente Kennedy , usually known as Avenida Beira Mar . These give way to the favelas and docks of the port area, Mucuripe , the gateway to the eastern beaches, notably Praia do Futuro , beyond which the city peters out.
While not the most visually attractive of Brazilian city centres, there is enough going on in the heart of Fortaleza to merit more attention than it usually gets from visitors. It certainly can't be faulted for being boring: the streets are very crowded, with shops and hawkers colonizing large areas of pavement and squares, so that much of the centre often seems like a single large market. Fortaleza is an excellent place for shopping , and you should stock up here if you're heading west, as you won't get comparable choice until you hit Belém, 1500km away. Clothes are plentiful and cheap, there is also good artesanato to be had, notably lace and leather, and Fortaleza is the largest centre for the manufacture and sale of hammocks in Brazil. |
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