Due to a strong economy and upcoming sporting events such as the FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games, investment is on the increase all over Brazil. An area seeing a massive rise in foreign investment is the North East, particularly Rio Grande do Norte and major cities such as Natal and Fortaleza.
Fortaleza is one of the largest cities in Brazil and for many years has been a major port on the north-east coast. The built-up area has a population of nearly three point five million and an area of 312 sq km (120 sq miles). That means the place has a very high population density, in fact the highest in the whole country.
The city has a long history, dating all the way back to the year 1500 when the site was discovered by the Spanish. However, the subsequent Treaty of Tordesillas transferred north eastern Brazil to the Portuguese who built a fort and the village of Nova Lisboa (‘New Lisbon’) on the site in the early 1600’s. They in turn lost the area temporarily to the Dutch before regaining it and renaming the settlement ‘Fortaleza de Nossa Senhora da Assuncao’.
In the year 1799 the surrounding area of Ceará was carved out of Pernambuco province to become its own province and Fortaleza was chosen as the new capital. For the next century, the nineteenth, Fortaleza became an increasingly important and rapidly-growing urban focus for the area, largely due to the prominent crop, cotton which was widely grown in the region. During the Brazilian civil war in the mid 1820’s Fortaleza was prominent. It featured in the struggle between the Federal government of Brazil and the breakaway provinces in the north east who tried to establish themselves as a new, independent country, the so-called ‘Confederation of the Equator’. The attempt failed and Brazil remained intact. In the middle years of the century Fortaleza expanded and improved both its physical infrastructure and the social position of its ordinary people. For instance, the province of Ceara (led by Fortaleza) freed all its black slaves in 1884, some years before the rest of the country did likewise.
Population growth in the city was fairly slow until the first couple of decades of the twentieth century. For instance, it wasn’t until 1922 that the city reached the hundred thousand mark, small by today’s standards of course but not bad at all for those times. The flow of people from the countryside to the city is a popular theme in histories of cities throughout the world and this is no less true of Fortaleza. Former country-dwellers flooded into the metropolis in search of opportunities, work and money. This flow greatly increased in the 1960’s when the new Industrial Zone encouraged many more firms and businesses to open up or expand in the city. In turn the area needed more workers, so more came and so the cycle continued to this very day. Altogether there are now many and varied opportunities nowadays for successful short term investment and of course long term investment too including agriculture, farmland, and more recently the very popular minha casa minha vida brazil (my house my life) social housing programme which is currently a major initiative in the city.
Around the turn of the recent century, Fortaleza improved its general layout and facilities greatly, with new and better major roads and social facilities such as hospitals and cultural centres. Tourism has also become much more important and the city and its surroundings are now among the leading destinations for that in Brazil. The city will be one of the host cities for the 2014 FIFA world cup championships which of course are being held in Brazil that year.
