That time an American billionaire tried to build his dream city in the Brazilian jungle

When Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors arrived to South America, they were enthralled by the possibility of wealth beyond their imagination that the untouched landscape offered. A few centuries later, an American billionaire saw something similar in the Brazilian jungle.

People like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk tend to portray themselves as visionaries, trying to apply their knowledge and know-how to improve society. However, before any of them, Henry Ford tried to go beyond… and failed.

In 1928, Henry Ford wasn’t just any captain of industry, for many people in the United States, he WAS the automobile industry. His mass-produced Ford Motor T was a turning point for industry, redefining the manufacturing process for decades.

As The Guardian explains, the Ford Motors founder was seeking to establish rubber plantations to lower the prices of car tires. However, a few acres of jungle wasn’t enough for Henry Ford.

Image: Ivars Utināns / Unsplash

The automobile industrialist wanted to build a city, designed on his personal philosophy of work ethic and American values. This utopian company town would help the humble name of Fordlandia or Fordlândia in Portuguese.

The Henry Ford Foundation explains that the founder of Ford Motors brokered a deal with the Brazilian government, getting a concession of one million hectares (2.5 million acres) in the middle of the Amazon jungle.

Image: wawa01 / Unsplash

Fordlandia was founded in 1928 and located in the northeastern Brazilian state of Pará. The town was planned to house 10,000 employees that would work on Ford’s rubber operations.

Hundreds of local workers came to Fordlandia, under the promise of good wages, free meals and housing, and all the advantages of the American way of life. However, they ended up getting far more than they bargained for.

The Guardian writes that Fordlandia was planned with features such as modern hospitals, schools, power generators, a sawmill, a water tower, a swimming pool, and an 18-hole golf course.

Pictured: The ruins of Fordlandia's hospital, once considered the most modern in South America.

A suburb, Vila Americana, was built for the US management with running water. Local Brazilian workers would have to do with water from wells.

Fordlandia also had very strict rules. Alcohol, tobacco, football (American or otherwise), and single women weren’t allowed within the city limits.

Local workers managed to go around these rules by establishing “Innocence Island”, a spot with bars, nightclubs, and brothels located eight kilometers (5 miles) upstream from Fordlandia.

As the Henry Ford Foundation explains, Brazilian locals had issues conforming to the American way of life.

Houses were built as they were in the American Mid-West (which weren’t practical for the jungle), and entertainment consisted of activities such as public lectures, poetry readings and square dancing!

Image: From the Collections of The Henry Ford.

The Ford Motors Company also expected employees to follow an eight-hour schedule, instead of working early in the morning and late in the afternoon to avoid the tropical sun.

Image: leonbeckert / Unsplash

Meals, which were provided for free, were also patterned after US cuisine. Native workers, then unaccustomed to hamburgers and canned food, would complain that the foreign meals would cause them stomachache.

Tensions ran high between native Brazilian workers and US managers. A few riots broke out, with the Brazilians brandishing machetes and destroying local buildings, and at one point there was a threat of the local military intervening.

Image: From the Collections of The Henry Ford.

The rubber plantations, which started very badly by trying to follow US-based agricultural knowledge, didn’t yield anywhere near the expected results.

Image: isuru18 / Unsplash

A change of management, an expert on tropical agriculture, relaxing policies, and a new town, Belterra, improved things somewhat but the writing was on the wall for Henry Ford’s tropical experiment.

Ford Motors officially abandoned the town in 1945, after housing US military personnel during the Second World War. By then, car tires were being made with synthetic rubber, rendering Fordlandia’s main economic drive obsolete.

Back in 2023, The Washington Post reported that some 2,000 people still live in Fordlandia, with many of them being impoverished descendants of Henry Ford’s workers.

The houses and buildings of this former industrial Utopia now lay abandoned, slowly being swallowed up by the jungle.