Tainha Time in Florianopolis

One surprising fact about Brazil that doesn’t fit with our lazy Latin stereotypes is the amount that people work. Not only does everybody in Brazil do something, from those selling doces on the buses and beaches to Paulista high-rise office workers, but they do it for long hours. At home, being a student means staying in bed smoking maconha all day and not being capable of making your two hours of Art History or Theology lectures a week. In Brazil, even students work full days then study another four hours at night, 5 nights a week.

Nobody works harder throughout the country than the fishermen of the southern coasts during Tainha Time. In the late autumn and winter months of May, June and July, the coastal waters of Santa Catarina are inundated with huge shoals of tainha, a type of mullet. Following tradition that has been maintained since the very first Azorean settlers arrived on the island, the local fishermen take to the open seas in their wooden boats day after day to make hay as the sun shines.

While the boats may have motors, the nets don’t. With no winches, all the catches are landed by hand. The nets are large to allow the young tainha to escape, while the adults are taken in great numbers into the boat. The typical Floripa Fisherman is short and stocky, with a deep tan and arms that make Popeye look like me. While out at sea, it is impossible to appreciate the amount of work that goes into pulling a net with perhaps dozens and dozens of 3-5kg fish.

Boat after boat arrives on the beach or at the dock to unload huge catches. Enormous nets are also spread out from the beaches, and the whole male half of the community, kids and adults, joins in the pull. The sands are soon piled full of hundreds of tainha, glistening and flopping around in the winter sun. One single cast into the waves with a personal net can bring in three or four at once.

As an insight into the traditional lifestyles that still form a big part of Florianopolis life, a trip to see the daily tainha catch arrive is very worthwhile. A helping hand may also result in you being one of the many people walking the streets of Floripa carrying a large fish as thank you for your help.

Clean it, gut it, fill it with fresh coriander and garlic, wrap it in aluminium, then put in the oven or the churrasco for 30 minutes. Leave the foil off for another 10 minutes or so and you can eat your catch.

President Lula in Florianopolis

Everybody’s favourite cuddly politician, President Lula recently visited Florianopolis and his visit was notable for a number of reasons, principally for the amount of money that the Federal and State Governments spent in relation to the visit.

Lula visited one of the traditional Floripa seafood restaurants, declaring that everybody who visits the Magic Island should try the Sequencia de Camarão dishes. He didn’t recommend the squid, unsurprisingly, perhaps attempting to preserve the species, but the idea for that sequence is just the same. Plate after plate arrives at your table, garlic, steamed and milanesa, until you really can’t look any more prawns (or squid) in the eye. Just as you are thinking about walking off the prawns with a stroll in the sun along the shores of Lagoa da Conceição, the main course arrives. The fish is usually eaten, the batatas fritas and salada too, but the rice usually goes back to the kitchen hardly touched. Once you have eaten one or two of these sequencias, you learn that when the menu says 2 pessoas, there is often enough for five people.

This immense amount of food surprises first time visitors, so if Lula and his entourage ordered the amount of food specified for each of them, there would likely have been an immense amount of waste. When the money comes out of the public funds to pay for this, there probably wouldn’t have been many complaints, and certainly not when compared to the money spent on the rest of the Floripa trip.

Lula was attending the World Trade and Tourism Council conference, one that has been many years in the organizing. As he arrived, he would have seen the huge adverts on the road out of the airport proclaiming Costão do Santinho to have been voted the Best Large Resort in Brazil this year. No mention of who voted for these awards, but if something smells a little fishy, it might not be your main course. The resort is a monstrosity dominating the corner of a beautiful beach on the Atlantic side of the island, with only surrounding dunes preventing the whole beach being developed. The resort’s owners have had a couple of run-ins with the Policia Federal over the years, for such minor crimes as not taking any notice at all of environmental regulations. Nothing ever comes of these cases though.

As well as spending millions of reais just to bring the gravy train to Floripa, there were a few hidden extra expenses, although not so well hidden that they haven’t made headlines in Brasilia. Being Brazil’s Best Large Resort, you would expect the price of hosting and housing so many conference delegates for the week to be very high. The resort had a new auditorium built especially for the conference. The accounts may not show, but the rent for using this auditorium was apparently unbelievably extortionate. Roughly the same price as it cost for the construction of the thing in the first place. Strange.

President Lula’s government agreed the price though, and will pay the bill using Brazilian taxpayers’ money, so surely all is above board. If this seems to the layman that the government is paying for the improvement of facilities at a privately-owned resort, the layman obviously doesn’t know the intricacies of government business. The fact that the owner of the resort is very good friends with the President of the Federation of Culture, who also happens to be the mother of the President of Embratur and friends with the Secretary of Tourism is completely unconnected of course, but if you would like to try to make connections for yourself, there are not too many dots to join.

Suffice to say that the next time Lula visits Florianopolis, whether he is still President of Brazil or not, he will probably not pay the rack rate for his stay in the Presidential Suite at Costão do Santinho.