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HISTORY OF BIG SUR COAST

  A new dawn:              Locals had long called for a road along the coast to aid shipwreck victims and improve access to isolated communities.  Construction started in 1919, and 18 years, 32 tonnes of dynamite and 33 bridges later, the Big Sur stretch of California Highway One was complete.               The implausible route, with its myriad twists and turns and dramatic drop-offs, became an instant classic.  The author and painter Henry Miller fled to Big Sur in 1944 and stayed for nearly two decades.  Photographer Edward Weston and Beat Generation bard Jack Kerouac fell under its spell.  By the late 1960’s San Francisco’s counterculture revolution had swept down to Big Sur, and the likes of Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell performed on the cliff tops.              ...
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AMAZON THEATRE

 

Amazon Theatre:


Amazon Theatre


                 The world’s most extraordinary opera house is not in Sydney of Milan, but deep in the Amazon rain forest.  Built against all the odds in the 1890s and recently restored, it still stands in all its opulent glory.

                   The second half of the 19th century was boom –time in Manaus, a steamy city that sprang up at the junction  of the Amazon and Negro rivers, right in the heart of the Amazon basin.  Brazil had a world monopoly on rubber, which grew naturally in the Amazon jungle, and Manaus was at the centre of this trade.

                     The immense wealth generated by rubber exports funded an extravagant lifestyle for the city’s rubber barons, who lit their cigars with dollar bills and bought diamonds on a grand scale: more diamonds were sold in Manaus at this time than anywhere else in the world.  The city became known as the ‘Paris of the Tropics’, but some residents wanted more than raw wealth.  They yearned for culture and entertainment that could rank alongside the very best in Europe. The idea for an opera house, El Teatro Amazons, was born.

Where on Earth?

                    The capital of the Brazilian state of Amazonas, Manaus is about 1,550 miles (2,500km) northwest of Rio de Janeiro on the Amazon River, where the Negro and Solimoes tributaries merge.  The city can be reached by air, road or boat: it takes five days from the port of Belem on the Atlantic Coast.






 

Location: Largo de São Sebastião - Centro, Manaus - AM, 69067-080, Brazil

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