Not Many Flew or Sailed Down to Rio: Tourism and Beach-Going in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro

Few other major cities are more closely associated with beaches and beach-going than Rio de Janeiro.

Travel guides, in turn, currently tout the city’s beaches as one of its main attractions and beach-going as

essential part of the tourist experience in Rio. In History and in other disciplines, the literature on beaches

and beach-going in Europe, North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean focuses, in one way or

another, overwhelmingly on tourism. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw various

proposals to transform Rio’s main oceanfront beaches (Copacabana and Ipanema) into a luxury seaside

resort comparable to Ostend, Deauville, Biarritz, or Miami. Nothing ever came of those proposals.

Likewise, the city’s government sought from the 1920s to make Rio a major tourist destination, but with

little success. This paper shows that the flow of tourists to Rio during most of the twentieth century was

small by comparative standards. The city was simply too far away from Europe and North America and

travel there too costly to attract a sizeable number of tourists. As a result, in contrast with what took

place in many other cities famous for their beaches, tourism did not play a significant role in shaping the

history of beach-going in Rio. The city never became a Brazilian Acapulco, Biarritz, Cancún, Miami,

Blackpool, or Deauville. Consequently, Rio’s beaches during most of the twentieth century remained

primarily for local consumption. Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire flew down to Rio, but, while there, in

the film, they did not go to the beach. “The girl from Ipanema” (Heloísa Pinheiro) did go to the beach,

but she was not a tourist; she lived in Ipanema, two blocks away from the beach.