Fortaleza: walking tour

At the turn of the twentieth century, Fortaleza was booming with cotton and rubber money, and its civic leaders had an urgent desire to look as cosmopolitan as Paris. Their answer was to order an entire theater from across the Atlantic, essentially in a flat-pack kit.

In 1908, a British cargo steamer named Gregory arrived at the port, carrying tons of prefabricated cast iron molded in Scottish foundries. The military engineer Bernardo José de Melo had been tasked with assembling this industrial jigsaw puzzle. When the building opened in June 1910, named after the Cearense novelist José de Alencar, it gave the city something quite singular: a classical facade out front that opened into a delicate, three-tiered Art Nouveau cage of iron lace and glass.

Building an iron greenhouse under the equatorial sun sounds like an invitation to roast your audience. Melo understood that danger. He designed the foyer and outer circulation galleries to stay open to the coastal breezes, creating a permeable border between the city outside and the eight hundred seats within.

Later in the twentieth century, the modernist landscape master Roberto Burle Marx added the courtyard garden. Instead of forcing European boxwood into the heat, he flooded the grounds with native tropical species. That contrast is what makes the space work so well: heavy Scottish iron floating lightly above lush Brazilian greenery.