Balneário Camboriú

The coast here was settled from 1758, when a few families from Porto Belo made their home at the mouth of the Camboriú river, and settlers from the Azores were among the first to fish and farm its valley. The town of Camboriú grew up a few kilometres inland, and its beach was for a long time an empty strip of sand and dunes with a few fishermen's houses. In the 20th century families from the Itajaí valley and the interior of Santa Catarina began to come down to the beach in summer, and boarding houses and summer cottages appeared along the shore.

The beach became a district of Camboriú in 1954, and in 1964 it separated from Camboriú as a municipality of its own, Balneário de Camboriú, later simplified to Balneário Camboriú. The building of the BR-101 motorway along the coast in the 1960s put the city within easy reach of Curitiba, Porto Alegre and, by road, Argentina and Paraguay, and the first apartment towers went up along Avenida Atlântica. Each decade since has built higher than the last, and beachfront flats now sell for up to about US$10,000 a square metre.

Between 2019 and the early 2020s came the completion of Infinity Coast, Yachthouse and One Tower, the tallest buildings in the country, confirming the city's nickname as the Brazilian Dubai. Today Balneário Camboriú is a year-round city of about 140,000 people whose population multiplies in summer.

Balneário Camboriú's culture is that of a resort: the beach by day and the night that follows. Its clubs made it a centre of electronic music, with Green Valley in the hills behind the city and Warung Beach Club just over the border in Itajaí both counted among the best clubs in Brazil and drawing touring DJs and crowds from across South America every summer. Bars, rooftop lounges and the restaurant strip at Barra Sul stay open late from December to Carnival.

The city is strongly Argentine and Paraguayan in summer, and Spanish is heard everywhere on the beach, in menus and in shop windows. Many Argentine families have bought apartments here, and the exchange rate between the two countries decides how busy each summer will be. There is also a large population of retirees and newcomers from other Brazilian states who have moved for the climate and the sense of safety.

Outdoor life is the other side of the city: surfing on the southern coves, paragliding from the hills, running and cycling along the seafront, and football on the sand. Santa Catarina's Azorean inheritance survives mostly in neighbouring fishing communities rather than in the city itself, and the German character of the Itajaí valley is an hour away in Blumenau. Residents are proud of their skyline and of the city's orderliness, and defensive about its reputation among other Brazilians as a place of concrete and little else.

About 140,000 people live in the municipality year-round, in one of the most densely built and vertical cities in Brazil, and the population is estimated to reach over a million at the height of summer. Almost everyone in the centre lives in an apartment; detached houses survive inland in Pioneiros, in the newer districts towards Camboriú and along the Interpraias road. Beachfront prices reach about US$10,000 a square metre, and construction cranes are a permanent part of the skyline.

The economy runs on tourism, construction and property, with services, shops and restaurants that depend on the summer trade. Many businesses earn most of their year's income between Christmas and Carnival and run on skeleton staff through the winter. The neighbouring port of Itajaí and the airport at Navegantes employ people from across the conurbation, and Balneário Camboriú is increasingly a home for remote workers and retirees from São Paulo, Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul.

A winter day starts slowly with a walk or run on the seafront and chimarrão or coffee; in summer the beach fills by mid-morning and the restaurants by nine at night. Traffic, water supply and the balance between endless building and the beach's quality of life are the running arguments of local politics, along with the cost of housing for the workers the resort economy depends on.

Seafood from the Santa Catarina coast is the local table, with shrimp served in many ways alongside rice, salad and fried fish. Fresh oysters and mussels come from the farms around Florianópolis and Penha, and grilled whole fish, fish moquecas and shrimp risotto fill the menus at Barra Sul and the beach restaurants of the southern coves. The pastel, a thin fried pastry filled with shrimp, cheese or meat, is the beach snack, sold from kiosks and by vendors on the sand.

The summer crowds have shaped the rest. Argentine visitors brought parrillas and steakhouses, and the churrascaria, the southern Brazilian rodízio of skewered meats, is everywhere. Italian restaurants and pizzerias reflect the Italian settlement of the region, while the bakeries and cafés show the German influence of the Itajaí valley with cuca crumble cake, strudel and other colonial-style baking, jams and cured sausages.

Away from the restaurants the city eats like the rest of the south: chimarrão in the morning, a plate-by-weight buffet at lunch, ice cream on the seafront in the evening and açaí bowls after the beach. Caipirinhas made with local cachaça or with vodka are the summer drink, and the wines of the Serra Gaúcha and the Santa Catarina highlands appear on most wine lists.