Tube time for the one percent. Photo: Fazenda Vista Verde
Another wave pool is slated for construction in Brazil, but you’ll have to buy property to surf it. Wavegarden announced that a new private residential community called Fazenda Vista Verde will be built in the peripheries of São Paulo with a wave pool included as an amenity for residents.
The community is sprouting up in the town of Araçoiaba da Serra located an hour and 20 minutes by car west of São Paulo. The four-million-square-meter project developed by LN Urbanismo will be divided up into at least 160 residential lots that measure 2,000 to 2,600 square meters each. The community and wave pool will be completed by the end of 2027.
Wavegarden already has two operational pools in Brazil: Praia da Grama near São Paulo and Surfland in Garopaba. Another pool, “Beyond the Club,” is slated to open in São Paulo proper in 2025.
The common thread that all these Wavegarden pools have – and all wave pools in Brazil for that matter – is that they aren’t open to the public. Wave pool technologies have found that their entry into the Brazilian market cannot mimic the commonly used public-oriented models that sell tickets to consumers. They sell the pools to the one-precent of Brazilians.
And it makes sense. According to the Gini index – a measure of inequality in family income – Brazil is the seventh most unequal country in the world. In other words, there are a few people who have a lot of money, while most of the country has little. Developers have determined that the best way to build a pool in Brazil is to tack it onto luxury residential projects to drive property value and sales. The American Wave Machine pool at Boa Vista Village uses the same model.
Buying land and/or building houses in these communities goes well into the million-dollar range. And even at Surfland, which uses a model similar to timeshares, the entry buy-in is around USD $30,000.
Most Brazilian surfers will never surf their country’s pools and Fazenda Vista Verde will be no different. That’s not to say the developers are evil; they’re reacting to the economic reality. The point is: Don’t expect Brazil’s wave pool boom to spark the next wave of the Brazilian storm. Only the few who can afford to live in these country clubs or the well-connected will be logging tube time.
