The hotels Brazil needs for the World Cup never got built
Rio could use the Gávea Tourist’s 400-odd rooms. Instead, it is an emblem of the obstacles that hinder Brazil’s World Cup preparations: cumbersome bureaucracy, a slow-moving judiciary and a lack of imaginative planning.
“The bureaucracy is phenomenal. The technical capacity of the
Brazilian state to produce infrastructure . . . is very low,” said Christopher Gaffney, visiting professor in architecture and urbanism at Rio’s Federal Fluminense University.
Just
a few miles from Rio’s tourist beaches, the hotel stands on concrete
pillars in splendid, crumbling isolation in a tropical forest. Its
terrace offers breathtaking views of Pedra da Gávea mountain, São
Conrado beach, and the glittering blue sea beyond.
Bullet holes
riddle its lower walls and pockmark wrecked cars that have been crammed
into a hole. Graffiti fingers a police officer as a thief. Creepers wind
through the circular air vents on the staircase, and most of the marble
stairs and blue bathroom tiles have long since been cannibalized.
Isabel
da Silva, 48, and her husband Ronaldo, 60, who run a restaurant in the
nearby Vila Canoas favela, built their first shack with wood paneling
from the hotel, sold to them, they said, by a security guard. “It is a
paradise up there,” said Ronaldo. “I’ve lived here for 38 years and it’s
been abandoned the whole time.”
Rio has around 34,000 rooms, of
which 22,000 are in conventional hotels, says the Brazilian Hotel
Industry Association. An additional 6,000 will be added by June, the
group says. .
The mayor’s office expects 1.5 million tourists
during the World Cup. A spokeswoman said that not all these tourists
will be in the city at the same time, and that this, along with
alternative accommodations such as private rental apartments and
bed-and-breakfasts, mean there will be room for everyone.
This
may be unduly optimistic — 49 of the 89 Rio hotels on the FIFA official
accommodation site are already reserved for stakeholder groups such as
the media or are fully booked online. Reports abound of sky-high rates. “There is high demand and a lack of offer, so the prices are very high,” Gaffney said.
A
survey last year by Brazilian tourist board Embratur showed Rio hotel
prices for the tournament had doubled during last year’s Confederations
Cup and averaged $461 a night. One company is even mounting a “football
fan camp” for 3,000 people.
The government is worried and held a meeting Jan. 15 with Rio hotel industry representatives to discuss allegations of “abusive prices.”
It
was agreed that hotel prices should not outpace the costs during the
notoriously expensive Rio periods of Carnival and New Year, when demand
is at a peak. It was also decided that average prices for New Year,
Carnival and World Cup accommodations would be published on hotel Web
sites.
The Gávea Tourist was planned as a timeshare hotel. Work
began in 1953 and ended in 1972. Its owners went bankrupt, leaving over
1,000 timeshare holders with nothing. The hotel sank into a legal
quagmire from which it has yet to emerge. It is now owned by GV2
Producoes, which acquired it at auction in 2011.
But a renovation
cannot begin until GV2 has the final legal documentation confirming
that it owns the building, which is held up in Brazil’s notoriously
complicated bureaucracy.
The hotel cannot benefit from tax breaks
that Rio has made available for hotel development until it has this
final authorization, GV2 director Jamil Suaiden said.
Brazil’s
government development bank did agree to provide the equivalent of
$378 million in financing for 10 Rio hotels under a program called
ProCopa Turismo, or Tourism for the Cup. But just three have opened. Two
more will open by June, a development bank spokesman said.
Gaffney,
the professor of urbanism, says the government could have introduced
more inventive measures to stimulate hotels while at the same time
addressing the city’s housing problem.
“You could make hotels
temporary. You could have hotels for the World Cup that could be turned
into housing,” he said. “There’s a lack of creativity, a lack of
imagination on the part of the organizers.”
The funds provided by
the development bank included the equivalent of $82 million for another
ghost hotel, the art deco Hotel Glória, in central Rio.
Built in 1922, the hotel has been closed since 2008, when it was bought by a company owned by businessman Eike Batista.
Batista’s EBX holding company declined to comment on the hotel.
Renovation work appears to have come to a halt — there is no sign of any
activity on the premises, and a security guard, who declined to give
his name, said no work had taken place for six months.
None of
that development bank money was directed towards a third iconic Rio
ghost hotel: the Nacional, an imposing glass-and-steel modernist
cylinder, not far from the Gávea Tourist in São Conrado.
The Nacional was designed by Oscar Niemeyer,
an iconic figure in Brazilian architecture who was also responsible for
much of the country’s modernist capital, Brasilia, an entire city built
in just 41 months in a desert during the late 1950s. The Nacional has
been empty since 1995 and was bought at auction in 2009 for the
equivalent of $35 million by businessman Marcelo Henrique Limírio
Gonçalves.
A proposed deal with the InterContinental Hotels Group
led to hopes that the Nacional would open for the World Cup. But the
deal did not materialize. The hotel remains boarded up. The last time
Rio noticed its existence was when pop star Justin Bieber sprayed graffiti on its walls during a wild weekend last November.
In
Vila Canoas, residents hope that the Gávea Tourist will be renovated,
bringing jobs and income to the favela. “It is a white elephant,” said
Isaias da Silva, 59, honorary president of the residents association,
from behind the counter of his ironmongers shop.
Lawyer Frederico
Trotta, who has worked on the Gávea Tourist case for decades, having
inherited it from his lawyer father, said tests have shown the hotel can
still be saved.
But builders laborer Silvio Veiga, 49, looked
doubtingly at the rotten ironwork protruding from one of the hotel’s
supporting concrete pillars. “They will have to knock it down and start
again,” he said.