It's Friday night at the Confraria das Artes, one of the hippest nightclubs in Brazil, and the crowded patio looks like a fashion shoot set in an antique store. Reclining on vintage couches and creaking rocking chairs under Moroccan chandeliers, dozens of long-limbed, honey-skinned blondes are sipping caipirinhas and flirting with tanned men in muscle shirts.
Supermodels Gisele Bundchen, Mariana Weickert and Alessandra Ambrosio are known to frequent the Confraria, as is local tennis star Gustavo Kuerten. Keen to discover who's who, I ask our waiter, Rogerio, a dashing 20-something surfer dude, to point out the bar's stars. But Rogerio is of no use.
"I don't know any of them," he shouts over the ambient dance track. "I just took this job to earn some money so I could surf all day. A few years ago no one cared anything about Floripa. But now it's gone crazy!"
If a local like Rogerio is disoriented, imagine how I feel. I thought I knew something about hip Brazil -- the chic resorts of Angra dos Reis, Buzios and Parati, where the likes of Mick Jagger, Naomi Campbell and Ronaldo hang out. But when a Brazilian friend in London told me that the hottest place in the country -- and the new Punta del Este of South America -- was an island city in the south called Florianopolis, I almost laughed. Floria what? It sounded like a Greek island. Or a brand of toothpaste. If it was so popular, why hadn't we heard of it? Turns out millions of South Americans have -- but they've been keeping it to themselves.
An hour's flight from Sao Paulo, not far from the border with Uruguay, Floripa, as it's known to locals, is the capital of Santa Catarina state. It lies on a gorgeous 483km2 island made up of 17th-century fishing villages, jungle-covered hills,
emerald lagoons and more than 40 pristine white sand beaches. Flying in from Sao Paulo, it looks like tropical paradise. Put a volcano on those hills, and it could be Hawaii.
Linked to the mainland by a single suspension bridge, for many years Floripa was -- like the rest of Santa Catarina -- a rural idyll.
But in the past five years, the island's popularity has exploded. As crime rates in Sao Paulo and Rio soared, wealthy urbanites snapped up homes on its beachfronts and opened restaurants, clubs and bars on its lagoon shores. In 2002, it was said Florianopolis was the best and safest place to live in Brazil. Today, more Brazilian and South American tourists head to Floripa on their December breaks than anywhere else in the country except for Rio. And in summer the regular population of 330,000 swells to more than 1 million.
They come for the beaches, the surfing, the snorkelling, the seafood and, of course, to party like only South Americans know how.
Setting the scene
If Floripa is a potential Punta del Este, the center of the "scene" is Lagoa da Conceicao, a village set around the main lagoon in the heart of the island, beneath the wooded hills. Kite surfers skim the glassy water, dodging wooden boats ferrying tourists to seafood restaurants on the far shores, and the sidewalks have the air of a hip southern Californian beach town: bustling surf shops, trendy coffee bars and an excellent gourmet "kilo restaurant" called Um Rosa, where regulars pile up huge portions of fresh fish, mussels, salads and organic meats from a buffet bar for 22 Brazilian reais a kilo (NT$336).
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