Brazil is at the top of its game: World Cup fever is ramping up, oil is fuelling a boom and the Olympics are on the way. Julian Evans goes on a hat-trick trip, tackling the classic star players from the new Copacabana Palace to the smartest Island striker.
Vast, immeasurable, an overspill of cultures, climates and radical identities, Brazil, the fifth largest nation on earth, feels more like an incomplete planet than a very big country. From Rio de Janeiro to Manaus, for example, is 2,700km; the same distance London is from Morocco or Greece. The best way to understand the most influential nation in Latin America is to think of it as a slideshow of ever-changing views.
Take Rio. Take the Copacabana Palace hotel, freshly refurbished to the tune of US$20million. Gone are the chintz and brocade, the swirly shagpile and the sense of stuffiness. The place has been given a lighter, more contemporary look and finally feels like what it is, a beach hotel, a fabulous glittering beach hotel. From my fifth-floor suite there is perhaps the world's most spectacular urban outlook: a beachfront highway, Burle Marx's four-kilometre snake of mosaic pavement, a scattering of kiosk cafes and palm trees, and the stupendous curling, vanishing length of Copacabana Beach, where the sand and the ocean are merely different sorts of light.
No comments:
Post a Comment