The ghost village is a tourist attraction in the Amazon

The ghost village is a tourist attraction in the Amazon


The ruins are located in Iranduba, 30 km from Manaus […]

Just like Fordlândia, in nearby Pará, a piece of Amazonian history remains abandoned and treated with contempt.

On the right bank of the Rio Negro, 30 kilometers from Manaus (AM), the village of Paricatuba continues to attract tourists who, alone, visit the ruins of what was an ancient leper colony, in the municipality of Iranduba.

The building, built at the end of the 19th century to house Italian immigrants during the Rubber Cycle, was also a house of detention, a high school of arts and crafts and a hospital for lepers.

According to the Durango Duarte Institute, the Belisário Penna leper colony had a capacity for three hundred patients and served as an isolation zone between 1931 and the early 1960s, when the patients were transferred to the Colônia Antônio Aleixo, in Manaus.




But not even law n. 4,260 of 2015, which declared the site an Intangible Cultural Heritage of the State of Amazonas, managed to guarantee better use of the site, currently occupied by the forest which collects what has been taken from it.

With a high potential for historical and experiential tourism, what other countries have managed to transform so well into a tourism product, the city of Paricatuba seems far from returning to what was an impressive architectural example, with Riga pine floors, walls with Portuguese tiles and colonial windows.



Construction of the former immigrant hostel in Paricatuba

According to reports found on social media, tourists talk about the difficulty not only of reaching the place, but also of finding people who can guide visitors.

And what the visitor sees today, in addition to the ruins, seems to be the result of hallucinations caused by the paricá, which gave its name to the village, in reference to the snuff produced with its bark and used in shamanic rituals.

Multipurpose ruins

At certain times of the year, Vila de Paricatuba takes on a ray of hope and hosts events set against the ruins.

In 2022, the project Christmas in the Municipalities illuminated the Paricatuba excavations to host musical and theatrical performances for the local community.

“It is an emblematic place and that is why we decided to organize the event here, covering the population of Iranduba and also Vila [de Paricatuba]because they deserve to see a show like this”, declared, at the time, Davi Nunes, conductor and director of the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios Claudio Santoro.

The previous year, the location had been the inspiration for the show Bolero – In the ruins of Paricatuba, created by the Corpo de Dança do Amazonas (CDA) with the aim of occupying public spaces with dance. Designed for the Paricatuba ruins, the presentation ended up becoming a live broadcast on the stage of the Teatro Amazonas, due to the restrictions of the covid pandemic.



Amazonas Dance Corps, in Paricatuba

Fordlândia: another ghost village

Located in the municipality of Aveiro, Pará, Fordlândia was one of the biggest failures in the history of the Ford car manufacturer in Brazil.

Owner Henry Ford, who invested heavily in creating a working-class city in the state in 1927, may have even tamed machines and men with his successful system of industrial production. But in the largest tropical forest in the world, the hollow of the rubber tree is much lower.

High temperatures, tropical diseases, and inadequate soil were the first obstacles in his attempt to produce his own latex for his factories in the United States.

In this text published in Travel by fareknow Ford’s 5 mistakes in the Amazon.



Fordlandia

Source: Terra

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