The 12 Beaches, Santos, Brazil

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Santos is a municipality in the State of Sao Paulo, Brazil, founded in 1546 by the Portuguese Nobleman Bras Cubas.  As of 2006, its population was estimated at 418,375.  Santos has the biggest seaport in Latin America, which traded over 72 million tons in 2006.  It is also a significant tourist center and has large industrial complexes and shipping centers.  The City also displays the Coffee Museum, where, once, coffee prices were negotiated.  They have a “football memorial”, dedicated to the city’s greatest players, amongst which is Pele.  Who is a Brazilian former soccer (football) player, rated by many as the greatest soccer player of all time.  He was given the title of athlete of the Century by the International Olympic Committee.

Some items of interest:

• Santos has a beach garden, 5.335 Km in length,that figures in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest beach front garden.
• The exportation of coffee from the Port of Santos gave rise to and greatly increased the modernity of the city.
• In 1899, Santos was the point of entry for the bubonic plague into Brazil.
• The Landscape of this port city has canals with over a hundred years of antiquity.

Now that you have some of the facts about Santos let get to the stories!  The last item above is very interesting because these canals are open to the air and provide the service of a modern sewer system.  Not a nice thing to walk by on a warm summer day!  I would see crabs and all kinds of little creepy crawlers in these canals and most of these little guys came out of the ocean.  Yes… the canals go straight into the Ocean.  There are many canals and they all eventually turn into the twelve outlets that go to the sea.  The canals are big enough to fit a car into but I rarely saw them full.

The one time that things get crazy is during the rainy seasons when flooding can be a problem.  Everyone on Santos and most of the Brazilian visitors actually select and reference the beach off of the Santos canal number.  I would often hear things like “I am going to canal eight”.  The other person would reply “No, No, you must go to canal eleven it is the best part of the beach”.

Now to me this just seem like crazy talk…let’s see… first of all I am not going to a breach that has a cities sewer flowing into it!  Secondly I am not going to build my house right next to this big old canal and just ignore the smell!

Well maybe the canals are like the sewer treatment facilities that we have in the United States and the bacteria naturally purifies it enough to allow it to be dumped into the Ocean like small towns and Cities who put it into rivers and lakes… not likely though.  I was an Auditor in the United States and I know that the the USA sets regulations to regulate such things and they required certain tests that must be passed regularly to be certain the “good” bacteria is doing the job of cleaning the waste.  I doubt that that is being done there.  So if you are ever in Santos and someone says lets go to the beach and we are going to canal Twelve (by the way, that is the one I heard was the best) just say no!  Go to Pria Grande it is better and only like 25 minutes away.

Canal and cultural story for Brazil:

Canals can save lives!  First I want to say that every family has problems and Brazilians are no exception.

I was visiting some friends one evening along for the ride was one of my buddies.  We had just sat down with this awesome family and were having some sweet bread and a soft drink when the 19 year old son came home.  He actually did not go into the house and the mom met him at the door when he called for her.  Earlier in the day he had sold their TV to some friends so he could buy something for his girl friend (at least that was his story).  The mom did not appreciate their only TV being sold and was informing the son that they could no longer trust him and were not going to let him stay in their home anymore.  This was not the first offense and it was time for Junior to grow up and move out.  The teen was not in control of his anger and lashed out at the mom.  By then the dad had to leave us (his guests) and see what all the ruckus was all about.  Now this guy was big, I am not small at six foot and he was a head taller than me.  The teen did not get his fathers height and instead took after the shorter mom.  So now that you can paint a picture of these two imagine this, we had moved to the porch and had a good view of the following.  The Dad told Junior to stop yelling and calling his mom names.  Junior than takes a swing at dad and clocks him in the jaw.  It was like hitting a wall and dad just kind of blinked, and as the seconds rolled by I thought the kid is dead.  Sure enough once the fact that junior had punched him sunk in dad moved with amazing speed and lunged forward grabbing junior around the neck and slamming him down hard on the hood of a near by car.  He then started choking him and bashing him into the cars windshield.

By this time the neighbors had all come out and when they saw the dad go crazy they all jumped in and pulled him off of junior.  The dad then went into the house and junior started yelling again when he could get enough air.  I started to say “you should leave your because dad is probably going to get his gun…” when dad bumped me on the way out the door and started running after the son with a big kitchen knife.  Junior ran a little faster than dad and was on the opposite side of the canal that split the road in next to their house.  They ran around like this for awhile until a police car showed up.  I was relieved thinking to my self that the cops would diffuse the situation like they do back in the United States.  So I watched as the dad on one side of the cop car and junior on the other side both plead their cases to the policeman.  Dad had gotten rid of the knife and mom brought it to the house so the cops did not see it.  The police did not even get out of the car, they simply said work it out and by the way make sure not to kill each other and then left.  My mouth dropped and dad and junior started their run around the canals once more.

So you see in this instance the canal is a life saver.  Nobody was killed or hurt.  Junior moved out and things got back to normal.  I even heard that junior was back in good standing with his family and it only took a couple of years.  One of the things I noticed was the whole neighborhood getting involved and helping out.  I don’t see that very often in our United States neighborhoods.

So if you get the chance to visit Santos take advantage of the old architecture, museums, and the feel of a new but old port.  Avoid the beaches for swimming but go ahead and enjoy a great walk on the beach!

Here is one way to get to Brazil!

Lord out.

Popularity: 59% [?]