Brazil has a new biggest favela, and it’s not in Rio de Janeiro
SOL NASCENTE, Brazil — The buzzing main avenue of this poor Brazilian neighborhood is filled with people popping off buses after work or grabbing a bite. Teens attend an openair rap battle and gymnastics class. Hymns and prayers from tiny church services spill into the night.
It’s an ordinary Wednesday in Brazil’s biggest favela, or low-income neighborhood. And for the first time since poverty, lack of opportunity and economic inequality caused favelas to mushroom across many of the nation’s cities, that superlative doesn’t belong to a favela in Rio de Janeiro.
Sol Nascente (Rising Sun, in English) is just 21 miles from capital Brasilia in the Federal District, whose GDP per capita is by far higher than any Brazilian state, underscoring the inequality between affluent public servants’ neighborhoods and the district’s outskirts.
The number of households in Sol Nascente has swelled 31% since 2010 to more than 32,000, surpassing Rio’s hillside Rocinha favela that had been Brazil’s most populous, according to preliminary data from the ongoing census. Rocinha has almost 31,000 households, the data show.
Along Sol Nascente’s unpaved dirt roads of selfbuilt homes and inside the main strip’s busy stores and restaurants, no one The Associated Press spoke to welcomed the new ranking.
“We still need lots of things, like basic sanitation and infrastructure, but people nowadays have better conditions. Some even have a car,” said street vendor Francisca Célia, 43.
Célia added that, despite its challenges, Sol Nascente isn’t nearly as disorganized nor dangerous as the favelas she saw when visiting Rio three years ago. Plus, available plots of land are much bigger.
“It’s a paradise here,” she said.
The growth of Sol Nascente’s population reflects new arrivals searching for cheap or unoccupied land to build homes, whereas elsewhere in the Federal District poor people often pay relatively high rents. It also mirrors the surge of people living in workingclass neighborhoods nationwide, driven by a generalized housing crisis caused by deep recession and higher rent prices, the effects of which were compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Marcelo Neri, an economist and social researcher at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a university and think tank.
The number of people living in areas the national statistics institute classifies as “subnormal agglomerates” jumped 40% to 16 million people since the 2010 census, according to the institute’s preliminary data, reviewed by the AP. Brazil’s population as a whole grew less than 9% in that period.
Subnormal agglomerates include not just favelas, but also other terms used in Brazil to describe urban areas with irregular occupation and deficient public services. Residents of Sol Nascente acknowledge that it once was a favela, but told the AP that many areas of the community have outgrown that term.
The statistics institute ceases to consider communities subnormal agglomerates once most residents gain legal title to their properties or all essential services are available, according to the institute’s geography coordinator, Cayo Franco.
Favelas grow as settlers move onto unoccupied public and private land, whether on steep hillsides or flatland, like Sol Nascente.