Maceio

Sugar and slavery built Maceió, and the legacies of both still shape the city. Capital of Alagoas—Brazil's poorest state—Maceió sits on a narrow coastal plain between the Atlantic Ocean and a lagoon system (Mundaú-Manguaba) that gives the city its name and its primary environmental challenge. Sugar cane plantations dominated Alagoas's economy from the colonial era through the 20th century, concentrating land ownership in a few families while creating a labor system that transitioned from slavery to rural poverty without meaningfully changing the power structure.

Maceió's economy has pivoted toward tourism and services without fully escaping its agricultural dependency. The city's coastline—turquoise water, natural reef pools, white sand—ranks among Brazil's most photogenic, and tourism has become the largest private-sector employer. Hotels, restaurants, and beach infrastructure line the neighborhoods of Pajuçara, Ponta Verde, and Jatiúca. But tourism employment is seasonal, low-wage, and vulnerable to economic downturns, making it a fragile replacement for the plantation economy it partially displaced.

The lagoon system that gives Maceió its beauty also gives it its deadliest problem. Salt mining beneath the city's Mutange, Pinheiro, and Bebedouro neighborhoods by Braskem—Latin America's largest petrochemical company—created geological subsidence that has displaced over 55,000 residents since 2018. Entire neighborhoods are sinking, buildings are cracking, and what was once stable ground is becoming uninhabitable. Braskem has allocated over R$15 billion for relocation and remediation.

Maceió demonstrates how extraction economies persist even when the extracted resource changes. Sugar extracted labor and soil fertility for centuries. Salt mining now extracts geological stability. In each case, the profits flow elsewhere while the environmental and social costs accumulate locally—a metabolic pattern that tropical coastal cities across Brazil share.