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Recife: Venice without the Gondolas

Tropical Venice

Capital of the northeastern state of Pernambuco, Recife lies where the Capibaribe meets the Beberibe River just in time for the two to flow hand-in-hand into the sea. The historic centre is literally an island unto itself, and it is one of three that comprisethe downtown area. Some 39 bridges crisscross a city that has been referred to as a tropical Venice.

Yet many visitors barely notice the riverside Recife. There are certainly no gondolas. Many tourists find lodgings on the hillside in Recife’s historic twin city Olinda. In the state capital itself all of the better hotels are located in the beachside Boa Viagem district – conveniently close to the airport and the main shopping mall, but with not a navigable stream in sight.

So when I discovered that Recife offered its version of the riverboat rides I’d taken along the Seine in Paris and the Thames in London, I jumped at the chance to learn about Recife’s 'waterside'. I took the night tour, thus transforming Recife into my own City of Lights for an evening.

Like everything in Recife, symbolically, at least, the tour really begins at Marco Zero (mark zero – the point from which distances to everywhere are measured). Recife means “reef,” and the shoreline is and indeed skirted by natural barriers. Across from Marco Zero a dike was built on the reef to provide extra protection for the old port area.

Atop the dike stands a starkly phallic sculpture. The author is yet another poetic native son, Francisco Brennand. His edifice soars 60 feet into the sky. But the artful tower itself is a relative anti-climax. The good part is “the making of.” The sculpture sparked one of Recife’s spiciest political scandals. Town officials could hardly have expected anything less when they granted a commission to an internationally renowned homeboy famous for erotic sculptures. But when Brennand turned in his design, it was indeed phallic, and yet nobody would own up to being the joy-killing prude. A local journalist revealed the culprit to be the mayor’s wife. To defend the first lady’s honour, the mayor invaded the paper’s newsroom and threatened the reporter at gunpoint. Soon it all blew over. City Hall had changed its mind. “The mayor has balls; the city will have its erection,” quipped Tobias Hecht in his “ethnographic novel” After Life.

Following Brennand’s mark, we passed relatively uneventfully by the old port (the construction of the new port, several miles south, is blamed by many for forcing sharks to surge northward in search of a new habitat along Recife’s fashionable beaches, but that’s another story). Here we could see only a couple of ships at dock. One was preparing for its 335-mile return trip to Fernando de Noronha, Pernambuco’s highly regulated nature reserve cum ecotourism attraction in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean - shuttling supplies to the island with necessities and bringing trash back to the mainland. Another vessel had been abandoned decades ago by some Soviet bloc shipper that hadn’t been able to pay its port fees. Talk about a living museum.