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Fortaleza
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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 BelAİm), 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 AssunA§A?o - 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. Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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Brazil,
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