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...
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