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 Belém), 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 Assunção - was built by the Portuguese in 1816 on the site of the earlier Dutch one. Hotels in Fortaleza |