Hoteis da Copa

The hotels Brazil needs for the World Cup never got built

View Photo Gallery — Brazil’s World Cup hotel problem: Some of the hotels Brazil expects to need for this year’s World Cup soccer tournament never got built. Others sit rotting.

By Dom Phillips, E-mail the writer

RIO DE JANEIRO — The Gavea Tourist is an empty shell of a hotel, a 14-story modernist monument of disintegrating concrete and decaying beauty that has been abandoned for four decades. It is one of three huge, architecturally stunning ghost hotels in Rio de Janeiro, all of which are vacant in a city facing a shortage of rooms for June’s World Cup soccer tournament.

Rio could use the Gavea Tourist’s 400-odd rooms. Instead, it is an emblem of the obstacles that hinder Brazil’s World Cup preparations: cumbersome bureaucracy, a slow-moving judiciary and a lack of imaginative planning.

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