Marco Giorgi, Fernando de Noronha. Photo by Timo

by Chas Smith

Tall and tan and young and lovely, the girl from Ipanema goes walking and when she passes each one she passes goes ahhhhhh….

The west is pregnant with Brazil. There she sticks, all round and glorious, into the warm Atlantic. She is pure possibility, pure potential, and she has been since the Age of Exploration.

She has more billionaires than Japan and she has more surfers.

When she walks she’s like a samba that swings so cool and sways so gentle that when she passes each one she passes goes oooooooh….

Surf consistency: 7 – Wave variety: 3
Climate: 8 – Budget: 5 – Radness: 6

The history of surfing in Brazil is shrouded in as much salty mystery as the history of surfing in general. There are whispers that, maybe, a small surf community sprang up on the beaches of Sao Paulo in the early 1940s but these whispers are the same as those that say surfing, in general, started in Peru and not Hawaii. Weird whispers that feel fundamentally flawed. The real pioneers, the real first timers, paddled into the warm Atlantic off of glimmering Rio de Janeiro.

Rio in the 1960s was as hot as dusky sin. Oscar Niemeyer was erecting sex in the form of architectural gorgeousness. “I am not attracted to straight angles or to the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man,” he said of his vavavavoom buildings. “I am attracted to free-flowing, sensual curves. The curves that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuousness of its rivers, in the waves of the ocean, and on the body of the beloved woman.” Oh Brazil’s beloved woman! Dusky sin! On the beaches of Rio, these beloved women were experimenting with bikinis so small, so teeny tiny, that the imagination was turned entirely off. No need to guess what lies beneath when it is right there in full Technicolor. Those bottoms! Those tops! Right there in full Technicolor!

And those hips were not just standing still, uninvolved. No. Those hips were swaying to the hottest new sounds anyone has ever heard.

What could be better? Buildings as sex on land, bikinis as sex on the beach, Bossa Nova so sexy in the air and surfing, perpetual sex, in the water.