Natal
World's busiest WWII airport became a beach resort became Brazil's wind energy capital — the same geographic extremity expressed through three different technologies.
During 1943, aircraft took off from Natal every three minutes. The city — South America's closest point to Africa, roughly 3,000 kilometres across the Atlantic — had become the world's busiest airport. Roosevelt called it the Trampoline to Victory. Parnamirim Field staged Allied operations across Africa and Europe. Natal's population doubled from 40,000 to 80,000 in three years. Then the Americans closed the base, and the city collapsed into what one historian described as a local economic crisis and more than a few half-American babies.
That boom-bust cycle was not an anomaly. It was a preview of Natal's recurring economic pattern: geographic extremity attracts a single dominant patron, the patron transforms the city, then the patron leaves or the resource shifts, and Natal reinvents from scratch.
The second cycle was tourism. Natal's beaches — Ponta Negra, Genipabu's dune fields, the 400-kilometre coastline that tourism boards market as having South America's purest air — built a service economy that became the city's primary industry. The concentration risk is identical to the wartime pattern: one sector, externally dependent, vulnerable to shocks that Natal cannot control.
The third cycle is forming now. Rio Grande do Norte generates 99% of its electricity from renewables, predominantly wind, making it Brazil's largest wind energy producer. The state attracted roughly $10 billion in energy investment in 2024 alone, creating 13,000 jobs. Brazil's first offshore wind pilot project is licensed at Areia Branca, along the state's coast. Green hydrogen production is in the pipeline. The same geographic extremity that made Natal the shortest Atlantic crossing for bombers now makes it the optimal site for wind turbines: consistent coastal trade winds, flat terrain, and proximity to export shipping lanes.
The biological mechanism is serial phase transition driven by a single geographic advantage expressed through different technologies. The constant is position: the nearest American landfall to Africa and Europe. The variable is what that position is worth in each era. In the 1940s, it was worth an airfield. In the 1990s, it was worth a beach resort. In the 2020s, it is worth a wind farm.
Whether the energy cycle breaks the pattern depends on something the previous cycles lacked: local ownership of the productive asset. US bombers left. Tourists can choose other beaches. But wind is not a patron that can withdraw. The resource is geological and meteorological, not contractual. If Natal's third transformation holds, it will be because the city finally matched its geographic advantage to an energy source that cannot relocate.