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Prostitution, crime and pollution have tarnished the reputation of Rio's Copacabana beach, famed as a high-society playground in its 1950s heyday. Now, the city's governors are determined to restore its lustre with radical plans for a clean-up.
Rio was still Brazil's capital when the bossa nova craze and
the beach's golden sands helped to make the Copacabana district a favoured destination for the international glitterati. But once the sex industry moved in, with one of South America's biggest prostitution clubs on the seafront promenade, the area deteriorated, sending property prices plummeting and driving out tourists to more desirable parts of the city.
Last week Rio's governor, Sergio Cabral, vowed to turn the "whorehouse into a temple of Rio culture", referring to his plan to remove the notorious Help club from the beach district and replace it with a museum dedicated to samba and the bossa nova music for which Copacabana became famous.
Named after the Beatles song, Help opened its doors in 1984 as a nightclub for Rio's middle classes. Since then it has become a well-known haunt of sex tourists and about 2000 call girls, according to a study by anthropologists Thaddeus Blanchette and Ana Paula da Silva.
Many have welcomed Help's demise, accusing the club of attracting drug traffickers and paedophiles. Horacio Magalhaes, president of the Society of the Friends of Copacabana, said the closure was "a dream coming true".
"We are going to be taking a problem, a cancer, out of the neighbourhood and adding a cultural and leisure option. We are not on a religious crusade. Copacabana has a bohemian vocation and we don't want to do away with this [but] it is bringing the neighbourhood down."
Cristina Reis, the president of one Copacabana residents' association, agrees. "The identity of the neighbourhood, its history, is dying," she said, "Our beach is totally polluted, the water is dirty and the pavements are full of holes. If you want to go and have a beer with your friends, everyone thinks they have to go home early because of the violence, because of the thieves. Things are ugly."
Copacabana's prostitutes have taken less kindly to the plans. Gabriela Leite, an activist for prostitutes, has described the closure as a "social cleansing".
Plans to pump life back into Copacabana also include a 700,000 reias ($551,750) project for an "odour control" system that will supposedly combat the stench of sewage from a nearby treatment plant with the fragrance of eucalyptus and jasmine.
"One year ago I was having breakfast with Sergio Cabral, and he was complaining of the smell that there is here in Copacabana," Wagner Victer, the president of Nova Cedae, Rio's water board, told the news site G1.
"Now, instead of smelling of human waste, Copacabana will smell of jasmine."
In an interview with a local newspaper O Dia, Rio's governor said the city's residents should no longer tolerate the degradation of their district. "These are things that, in Rio, people start considering normal.
Paramilitaries are normal, drug trafficking is normal and this permanent stench on the main postcard of the city is normal," he said. "Nobody spends 10 [or] 12 hours on a plane and comes here to see such lamentable things and suffer this unpleasant smell.
"We are trying to reverse things and I think [closing] Help is the first step - the start of a process of revitalisation," said Magalhaes.
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