Travel Blog: Fortaleza and the Real Deal Brazilian Steak House

Fortaleza was our final stop in Brazil, and we had yet to see the real Brazilian version of the Brazilian steak house, or churrascaria, that we had at home. That would be remedied, we hoped, as our excursion was entitled 'Fortaleza Discovery and Brazilian BBQ Lunch'.

Fortaleza still has lots of narrow streets, even though it is heavily built up, so we were surprised to find that our tour bus was one of the double-level highway style. With only 32 of us on the tour, we only used the upper level so it seemed overkill, and we spent a good part of the tour feeling sorry for the driver who had to manoeuver around some tight corners and under a few bridges that cut it close height-wise.

This fishermens' community, or favela, was
located just outside the port area in a large bay

We don't know why they are there, but we passed
some of these cute 'installations' along
the main street. I missed the first few

Our first stop was at Theatro Jose de Alencar. de Alencar was a novelist, dramatist, lawyer, politician, and orator who was born in Fortaleza and lived from 1829 to 1877. He wrote 18 novels and 7 plays, and is considered one of the most influential Brazilian novelists of the Romantic Period. The theatre is in Art Nouveau style with 120 seats, and was opened in 1910. The cast iron for the theatre structure was actually imported from Glasgow, Scotland, and there's quite a bit of it. The theatre is now recognized as a historic structure by the Brazilian National Historic and Artistic Heritage Institute.

The entrance and foyer building

The courtyard and front of the theatre building itself.
It's quite impressive

Local four-legged Security on his morning siesta break

The interior of the theatre was all painted, even the
parts that look like marble, by a handicapped artist who appears to
get no credit for it. I forgot his name and it isn't included
in any references I can find online.

The wrought iron balconies and the back side of the
stained glass over the entrance

After our visit to the theatre, we went to the Casa do Cultura - that's Brazilian for 'Old Prison Turned into a Local Market' - for about 45 minutes of looking around and shopping. As before, we were done with the 'shopping' after about 10 minutes, but at least the prison here had larger courtyards and somewhere shady to sit.

Our next visit was to the Cathedral of St. Joseph which we had driven by earlier in the morning. It is a very impressive structure which can hold 3,000 people for celebrations of mass.

The church was built between 1938 and 1978. Maybe that's why it has such clean lines inside with the only colour coming from all of those impressive stained glass windows.

And then it was on to the highlight of the tour - our Brazilian Steak House Lunch! The venue was the JP Steakhouse across from Iracema Beach. The restaurant was on the second floor, and quite large with windows overlooking the beach. The salad bar was huge, with a selection that included sushi rolls, a huge wheel of parmesan cheese, beans, rice, and at least a dozen kinds of salad.

When we sat down, we explained the process to the family sitting across the table from us, and THEN the meat started coming. Apparently they were told to ignore the little 'More Please' and 'No Thanks' signs for the cruise ship group. We could barely finish, or even taste, one thing before the next appeared.

The first cut of beef

My plate after going around the salad bar and the first beef delivery. Choices
included mussels, shrimp,
and the Brazilian shredded beef and mashed potato dish we'd
had before.

This was a very, very tender brisket as far as
I could tell. Delicious!

Pork ribs

The food came so fast and furious that I couldn't get photos of all of it, nor did we ever have enough room on our plates to take some of everything. There were sausages, bacon wrapped chicken breast chunks, even small pieces of liver! We did eventually also see some grilled pineapple that they brought out on trays, but by then we'd already had our Pudim, like creme caramel, and we were still supposed to go to an ice cream shop.

Where some of the meats are grilled

Our Pudim dessert

We didn't take any photos of the ice cream stop, although the mandarin flavoured ice cream we had was very good. We were literally stuffed by the time we got back on the bus to return to the ship.

The view from the beach. Silver Moon was sitting
perfectly in between these two trees.

The view when we left Fortaleza just as the sun
was setting.

We had two days at sea that were a little rocky-rolly, so my daily 30-minute swim could be a little adventurous. The ship's swimming pool is 7 feet deep at the deep end, so even though there was quite a bit of movement, the water didn't splash up and out as much as on other ships. At times it felt like swimming at an island beach in the Caribbean Sea.

We didn't know why we were stopping at Ile Royale in French Guaiana, but we had an afternoon there before another sea day to Bridgetown. We had heard that there wasn't much on the island, and when we saw how difficult it was for some people to get into and out of the tender boats, we decided not to bother going ashore.

The claim to fame of this group of three islands, ironically called the Salvation Islands, is that they were a penal colony set up by France. The most notorious of these islands is Devil's Island, Ile de Diable, The three islands were a penal colony for 100 years, finally closing in 1953. No one is allowed to visit Devil's Island, but the other two have some facilities for boats to anchor nearby.

The book Papillon, made into a movie in 1971, was the account of Henri Charriere, who claimed to have escaped from Devil's Island by making sacks of coconuts into a raft. One of our fellow guests knew Charriere in Venezuela, where he lived after being caught again and serving a second sentence on the mainland, and was disappointed that he couldn't go to the island. But then again, according to the French government, Charriere had never been on Devil's Island at all, but in a mainland prison, and the book is a work of fiction.