Fordlândia is a reminder of how the Amazon rainforest resists business interests

Fordlândia is a reminder of how the Amazon rainforest resists business interests

If you draw a circle around the perimeter of the Amazon rainforest on a map of Brazil and place your finger in the centre, chances are you will have landed close to Fordlândia.

Six hours by fast boat up the Tapajós river from Santarém, in central Amazonia, the hamlet can comfortably claim to be off the beaten path. Yet it was here, in the late 1920s, that the industrialist Henry Ford decided to construct not only a rubber plantation to feed the production of cars in the US, but a model American town to go alongside it.

Ford never visited his last great project and the Amazonian plantation failed miserably for a litany of reasons — from the hubris of the Ford men to a blight that prevented the mass production of the Hevea rubber tree. But the town remains standing today, quietly decaying amid the encroaching forest. The cathedral-like sawmill is now a makeshift garage. On the back of a decrepit, century-old Ford jeep sits a metal coffin, one of hundreds used to lay to rest the men, women and children who succumbed to the hardships of the rainforest.

The decay of Fordlândia after it was handed back to the Brazilian government