ABOUT VILLA LEONOR

When I first came to Rio in 1997 I had never heard of Santa Teresa. I spent my first night in Brazil in Copacabana, in a memorable hotel as it happened, but by nightfall on the second day I was on the next plane to Bahia. The high rises, the gridded four-lane streets, the broad sands of Copacabana and Ipanema with just a handful of palm trees per mile were not what I had expected to find. The pace was too frenetic, the architecture too anonimous. There were prostitutes everywhere. And the rest of the residents were too well-to-do to reflect a country in which, despite all its blessings, we know poverty and violence to be rife.

I was to return several times to Rio before discovering Santa Teresa. A few years ago a friend in Salvador told me it was there: 'like Pelhourinho, without the crime'. Pelhourinho, in Salvador, is a unique place that never ceases to throw up new marvels, where miracles have always unfurled on every corner, every day, where the line between sensuousness and religion is perhaps at its very finest. Unfortunately, it's also the only place that I have ever been mugged in Brazil (earlier this year , when I was stripped of the protective pendant I had been given by the same friend less than an hour earlier - such is Pelourinho...), so his words had resonance.

Occasionally people arrive at Villa Leonor and politely or abusively express their disappointment at not finding what they expected. They are looking for infrastructure: a metro station within a certain number of blocks, shops with tall glass windows and spotlights, air-conditioned restaurants with menus in English, noise, tour buses, tourist agencies, other hotels posher than theirs with porters with umbrellas etc. that they can imagine being able to afford... And I completely respect that. They will not find those things here though. They will find art and music and bars and restaurants and children and grown-ups and grown-up children (the latter being people for whom the previous five items are still the most important in life). They will be able to spend their days on the beach or visiting nearby Corcovado or Sugarloaf or the botanical gardens or Cinelândia - in the knowledge that in the afternoon and evening the quiet, cobbled streets of Santa Teresa await them with their pockets of bars and restaurants brimming with rascals and raconteurs, with their village squares teeming with children, with the sudden shock views of favelas around one corner or the Christ statue appearing around another and the frenzy of Lapa just a ten-minute walk down the hill.

Rio is a place of magnificent, fearsome contrasts. Tourists are increasingly responsible about their participation with local societies and ecologies. If you have the energy to tackle the winding, precarious streets and stairways; if you want to interact with Brazil, not just enjoy its pleasures while denying its pains; if you want a chance to fathom Rio's spell, to face its vitality in a place of calm and culture and history, then your conscience should not dictate anything less than a stay in Santa.

As for Villa Leonor, I hope that you will find people staying here with values not far from your own. You will certainly be safe and comfortable and well fed! And you will savour the staggering calm of a perch so close to the centre of the city. You will meet Cariocans passing through the bar who will be very happy to share their city and their way of life with you. You will be able to get easily to all parts of Rio (on foot or by public transport, and if you hire a car then you have the best shortcuts in the city at your disposal). You will find out about places to go that your guidebook doesn't include or cannot explain - rather than those it has included and explained and thereby doomed forever. You will, in short, be welcome!