Sao Luis is a poor city, the most emphatically Third World of all the state capitals of the Northeast. There are power cuts, things don't work, some of the historic city centre is literally falling to pieces, and the infant mortality rate is comparable to those of poor African countries. It has a huge black population, a legacy of plantation development during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is also far larger than it seems from the compact city centre; about 740,000 people live here, most of them in sprawling favelas, with the middle classes concentrated in the beach areas of Ponta da Areia, São Francisco and Olho d'Agua, linked to the rest of the city by a ring road and the bridge built out from the centre across the Rio Anil.
But, for all its problems, Sao Luis is still a fascinating place, undeservedly neglected by travellers. Built across the junction of two rivers and the sea, on an island within the larger delta formed by the Pindaré and Itapicuru rivers, it has the umbilical connection with rivers that marks an Amazon city, but is also a seaport with ocean beaches. Since 1989, two hundred buildings in the historic centre, the Zona , have benefited from a large-scale restoration programme, the Projeto Reviver . Meanwhile, other parts of the colonial heritage continue to crumble but have their own unique atmosphere: there are people packed cheek by jowl, workshops, stalls, brothels, dormitórios - in short, a living and breathing heart of a city, not something lifelessly preserved for consumption by outsiders. Hotels in Sao Luiz |
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