Tourists Flock To Brazilian Slums While Locals Avoid
A new trend appearing in the slums of Brazil is a high number of foreign tourists and expatriates who visit or even move into the impoverished areas. Meanwhile, Brazil's middle and upper classes keep their distance from the dangerous slums.
"To many Brazilians, favelas are dirty, violent, frightening places. But to many foreigners, they are exciting, interesting, and romantic. More and more outsiders are coming from overseas to live, work, and just visit favelas, observers say. In doing so they are highlighting the difference between Brazilians who regard favelas with fear, rejection, and even disgust, and foreigners who embrace them as vibrant crucibles of modern Brazilian culture."
"Although about 1-in-5 residents of Rio live in favelas, the communities hold little interest, and a great deal of fear, for the elite and middle class."
"Much of the daily bloodshed that has made Brazil the second most violent country in the world, according to UNESCO, takes place in the favelas. With basic amenities like sanitation, running water, roads, lighting, and policing often absent, few dare venture in."
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A Different Take On Rio's Favelas
The difference, of course, between gringo voyeurs like Messrs. Alett or Nadkardi or Eichhorn taking up residence in Rio's favelas, is that they can move back to the middle class neighbourhoods where they came from (in America or Britain or Germany) anytime they want, whereas the (Brazilian) slum dwellers around them have no other option.
There is a huge psychological difference between being stuck living in a slum (wherever it may be) because one can't afford anything else, and living there simply because one thinks it's a cool thing to do. Of course middle class Brazilians aren't interested in hanging out in favelas; the millions of Brazilians forced to live in them would rather not be there either.
I've walked around Rocinha, reputedly Rio's largest favala (just on the other side of the hill from fashionable Ipanema and Leblon); I don't see anything charming about this huge, sprawling, dirty, dangerous, polluted hillside slum... and, moreover, most people living there would clearly prefer to be living somewhere else.