Porto Marina Bracuhy

History

Bracuhy is the work of design, not of chance. The urban layout of the place — wide, deep canals, dry and wet marinas, squares, roads and communal areas — is credited, in the sales material of the peninsula’s developments, to the town planner Harry James Colei, author in the 1970s of the Porto Bracuhy Tourism Complex. It was a bold bet for the time: instead of subdividing the hillside and looking at the sea from afar, digging into the mainland and bringing the sea to the houses’ front doors.

What is today called Porto Marina Bracuhy is one of the residential condominiums born from that base. It coexists with the others under the umbrella of the Condomínio Geral do Bracuhy, the structure that manages the complex’s common areas and whose bylaws were approved at an extraordinary general meeting on 17 May 1997, updated in 2002. This management body is responsible for the main gatehouse, canal navigation, monthly water sampling and analysis, and the peninsula’s environmental measures.

• Concept: the true nautical house — the resident steps off the living room, crosses the garden and boards the boat. The canal, not the street, is the address’s axis.
• Curiosities: access to the marina is via the Porto Bracuhy interchange, at km 500.5 of the Rio–Santos highway, and then along Avenida Boulevard Marazul, passing the ruins of an old sugar mill — a trace of the colonial cycle the Costa Verde still keeps under the forest.

Architecture and aesthetics

There is no single architecture in Bracuhy, and that is the place’s character: the plots are sold and the houses built by each owner, which has produced a repertoire ranging from the 1980s beach house to the contemporary residence of straight lines and large glazed openings. What gives the ensemble coherence is not style, it is the rule of the water — almost every canal house is organised around the same design decision: the social front turns its back to the street and opens onto the mooring deck, with the pool between the living room and the quay. The forest climbing the hillside behind and Pico do Frade on the horizon do the rest of the work.

Aesthetics and scarcity

Technical specifications

• Towers and units: not a tower. A horizontal condominium of houses and plots, with canal-front, coastal and inner-block houses. Local market material describes more than 500,000 m² of wooded private area across the Porto Bracuhy complex.
• Floor areas: variable, as this involves individual construction on plots. No typology is declared by the development.
• Parking spaces: according to each house.
• Structural highlights: navigable canals with a declared depth of up to 3.5 m at low tide, allowing a boat to moor in front of the residence; private beach; cycle path; 24-hour camera-monitored security; and Marina Bracuhyi, operated by BR Marinas, with 125 dry berths (100 by forklift and 25 by travel lift, for boats up to 83 feet) and 320 wet berths for vessels up to 50 metres.
• Registry and parameters: condominium on the Rio de Janeiro coastline, outside the scope of the urban planning parameters covered by the São Paulo survey. Registry jurisdiction not confirmed by any source — the field is left blank.

Leisure and facilities

• Navigable canals with mooring in front of the house
• Private beach
• Dry and wet marina (Marina Bracuhyi)
• Cycle path
• 24-hour gatehouse and security

Location and surroundings

Points of interest · distances in metres

Access

• By land: BR-101 (Rodovia Governador Mário Covas), km 500.5 — Porto Bracuhy interchange and Avenida Boulevard Marazul.
• By sea: access channel marked out by the Navy, hailed on VHF channel 68.

Angra dos Reis: the address

Angra dos Reisi holds, at the western tip of its coastline, a geography with no equal: the mouth of the Bracuí river forms a calm-water estuary sheltered from the open bay, and that is where Bracuhy was built. From a sailor’s point of view, the position is the argument — from here you can reach both the Angra archipelago and the coves of Paratyi without facing rough seas, and by boat you reach Ilha Grande in a short time. By land, the BR-101 is the only route, which makes Bracuhy a long-weekend and second-home address: arrival is planned, not improvised. The trade-off for that seclusion is silence — the western bank of the estuary is a permanent-preservation area, untouched, and what you see from the veranda will go on being forest.