Fordlândia, region of Pará, Brazil
The History :
At the beginning of the 20th century, the American industrialist Henri Ford was forced to buy the rubber from the English to equip its automobiles. Indeed, England had a monopoly on the intensive exploitation of the rubber through rubber plantations in its colonies of South East Asia. As the United States had no colonies where to cultivate its own rubber, Henri Ford negotiated the purchase for a low price, a huge territory in the heart of the Amazon in Brazil.
On the banks of the Rio Tapajós, Henri Ford cleared a million hectares of forest and established in 1928 a city, Fordlandia, a true utopian project of civilization of the Amazon. In addition to the factories and an iconic watertank distributing water punctuating the landscape with fire pumps, the city had a school, a hospital, and residential neighborhoods with houses built in the style of the architecture of Michigan.
By incompetence and ignorance, the plantation and the urban project was a total fiasco. In the 1930s, Henri Ford moved his project a few hundreds of kilometers North, in Belterra, where again, he built a town on an American model. But it also was a complete failure. Henri Ford has never managed to exploit the slightest drop of rubber, in Fordlândia or Belterra, and the territory was finally returned to Brazil in 1945.
Henri Ford has never set a foot in Brazil.
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