Just A Car Guy: there are very few cities that have outlawed engine powered vehicles (or simply have no roads), and only allow pedal bikes. You're probably familiar with them, Mackinac Island, Telluride, and Venice. But here's one in Brazil, Afuá, that simply floods too often to make cars possible

Monday, May 13, 2024

there are very few cities that have outlawed engine powered vehicles (or simply have no roads), and only allow pedal bikes. You're probably familiar with them, Mackinac Island, Telluride, and Venice. But here's one in Brazil, Afuá, that simply floods too often to make cars possible

Since 2002, this city where the Amazon River meets the Atlantic has been famously off-limits to motor vehicles.

A city of boardwalks, boats and bicycle-taxis is refreshingly free of gridlock, but not diesel exhaust fumes from generators running night and day to keep the lights on, Afuá has yet to be plugged into the national grid fueled by hydroelectric dams.

It wasn't a matter of environmental scruples. Cars and motorways had no place in this town of 38,000, much of which is built on stilts and sits above the chronically submersed floodplains of Marajó Island, near where the world's largest river empties into the Atlantic.

The problem is getting there. Afuá sits on the upper lip of a fluvial island in Brazil's forgotten far north. There are no overland connections to the rest of the country.

Locals call their hometown the Venice of the Amazon, because of its filigree of waterways and the fleet of boats that ply them.