Colossus in the Brazilian Amazon: The Soccer Stadium, the City, and the Nation in Manaus, 1958–70

On April 5, 1970, the Brazilian national soccer team traveled to Manaus to play in the newly-built Vivaldo Lima stadium (the ‘Colossus of the North’). Observers hailed the event – the first time the national squad had visited the city – as evidence of Manaus’s rising status in the nation and Brazil’s strategic hold on the Amazon. Manaus, a city at the geographic and symbolic heart of the rainforest, had become a booming free trade port as part of the Brazilian military regime’s strategy for national integration in the late 1960s. Mostly migrant laborers built the 50,000-capacity stadium on the edge of Manaus’s growing urban sprawl. Politicians, sports administrators, and journalists envisaged the Colossus as the embodiment of a modern rupture in Manaus’s tropical history. As the national anthem blared out under the Amazonian sun, civilian dignitaries and military officials stood rigid on the turf. Yet in the western reaches of the barely completed stadium, five thousand ticketless spectators seized the solemn moment to surge through gaps in the perimeter, thus challenging the ‘order and progress’ the stadium was supposed to represent.

This paper analyzes the ideas and policies that informed the construction and unveiling of the Colossus, and the project’s implications for the city in the nation. In practice, many of Manaus’s civic leaders and urban residents used the stadium as a crutch upon which to express ambivalence about their city’s (and their own) place in the Amazon region and the Brazilian nation. Indeed, more public angst would erupt in 2011 as the state government demolished the stadium and replaced it with a new ‘FIFA-standard’ arena for the 2014 World Cup.