News

Source: The Sunday Times
Published: January 27, 2008

As the locals prepare to samba, British buyers are starting to make a real song and dance about Bahia, Paraiba, Natal, Pernambuco, Rio Grande do Norte and Ceara the world’s largest and longest street party will erupt this week into a bright flurry of feathers, booty-shaking music and white-toothed smiles. Amid the throngs of carnival-goers will be thousands of Britons dressed in little but flip-flops and the pink beginnings of a tan – many of whom will decide to carry on after the party and invest in a second home in Brazil. Most potential buyers head to the northeast of the country, where, along more than 1,000 miles of coast from Salvador to Fortaleza, fishing hamlets are being swallowed up by gated resorts with private pools, golf courses and spas. In a reflection of the continent’s obsession with beautiful bodies, some of the developments even have plastic-surgery clinics and rehabilitation spas. If you can put up with the flight (at least £400 and 8½ hours, often with one or two changes), then the attractions are obvious: long, pristine white-sand beaches, temperatures that reach 30C in January and February, low living costs and properties that are up to a third cheaper than their equivalents in southern Spain. Indeed, many of the developers andimobiliarias funding the building boom cut their teeth on the costas and have crossed the Atlantic in search of a stake in the country Goldman Sachs predicts will have the world’s fifth-largest economy by 2050. Property prices have seen stratospheric growth, fuelled by an emerging Brazilian middle class, an international campaign to attract investors, and the 2014 World Cup, to be staged across the whole country. “Some locations have seen capital appreciation of more than 1,000% in five years,” says Felipe Cavalcante de Melo Lima, president of the Association for the Development of Tourism and Real Estate in the Brazilian Northeast. He predicts a more modest 12% increase for this year. “It is like southern Spain 10 or 20 years ago,” agrees David Gordon, commercial director of Qualta Resorts, which is behind two of the largest upmarket resorts in the states of Pernambuco and Rio Grande do Norte. “Brazil is a fabulous alternative to Spain and is more affordable than the Caribbean. People are fed up with the classic Costa del Sol pitch, which has become one big ghetto of British people.”