A flying visit at the fishermen of Prainha do Canto Verde
Prainha do Canto Verde - The village
Prainha do Canto Verde is one of the last traditional fishing villages in the north-east of Brazil. It is located  about 120 kilometres south-east of Fortaleza, the regional capital of Cearas, and basically consists of a few dozen small houses with more or less spacious front gardens spread across the village, a school, a bakery, a village shop, two simple boarding-houses, a fishing house, a few palm trees, no church and an endlessly long and wide sand beach. Every morning, several jangadas wait to be pushed into the silver-grey early morning sea. Jangadas are small, traditional fishing boats equipped with a triangular sail that are flat like a raft and up to five metres long. The men and sometimes women who dare to go out to sea with these boats, and stay there fishing for up to four days in a row, are called jangadeiros in Brazil. The jangadas of Prainha do Canto Verde are not only part of the sustainable fishing project in collaboration with the international Marine Stewardship Council and the Instituto Terramar dealing with the sustainable coast development of Ceara, but they are also "trademarks" of the "Projeto de Ecoturismo de Prainha do Canto Verde".
Most of the 1,100 inhabitants of Canto Verde are either fishermen or originate from fishing families. The 38-year old Joao is also a jangadeiro and the son of a jangadeiro. In short trousers  and stripped to the waist, he comes up from the beach carrying two huge forearm-sized fish in his strong hand. "Bonitos (tunas)," he says and shows them to me with a proud smile on his lips. His wife Aila would prepare them for dinner. In contrast to his father, Joao fishes only on an occasional basis. He and Aila own the "Sol e Mar" boarding-house, where I'm staying. The small and simple boarding-house is part of the "Projeto de Ecoturismo de Prainha do Canto Verde". The same goes for the private rooms and two small holiday houses that are rented out by fishing families to vacationers. In contrast to most tourism regions in Brazil or other developing countries, the local people are to benefit here in Canto Verde from the vacationers instead of major hotel groups or foreign investors.
Daily and mass tourism not welcome
"We still have about 150 jangadeiros here," says Joao. But as robber fishermen from other regions have almost destroyed the fishing grounds of Canto Verde by over fishing in the past, it was not enough to survive. For example, there were practically no sharks out in the fishing grounds anymore. They have been ruthlessly hunted down only to cut off their fins. Now the robber fishermen were after the profitable spiny lobsters that normally make up the main income of Canto Verde’s jangadeiros. Now tourism is to replenish, but not replace, income from sustainable fishing "Tourism tranquilo," emphasises Joao. "We don't want any loud tourism, no mass tourism, here."
For a short period of time now, there has been a narrow, falted  street leading to Canto Verde. The big air-conditioned coaches of daily mass tourism do not come here.reshly asph The association of the village people, the "Associacao dos Moradores", does its best to keep it that way. Instead of real sharks, there have been real estate sharks descending upon the coast of Canto Verde trying to buy up houses and properties at low prices since 1991. However, the Associacao dos Moradores has long put a stop to land speculators through strict, local land and ownership laws. "Houses and properties may only be sold on approval of the Associacao dos Moradores;" says the regulation for land use of Prainha do Canto Verde.
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