If you walk today through Praça Fernando Machado, in downtown Florianópolis, you can pass over an entire building without noticing. It is right there, beneath your feet: the floor plan of a pier drawn into the pavement, with a stylized portico and columns. It was the way the city government found, in 2001, to recall what once stood on that spot. The Bar Miramar.
The pier where the city arrived
The Miramar opened on September 28, 1928, facing the old Largo da Matriz (the historic church square), in the heart of the city. It was not just a bar. It was the pier from which the Florianópolis of that era boarded and disembarked. Before the bridges could handle everything, many of those arriving on or leaving the Island passed through here, amid suitcases, farewells, and the wait for the next boat.
Over time, the pier became a meeting place. Those who lived in the city back then recall that the Miramar drew people who came to see the sea, have a drink, and sit watching the movement of the bay. A place that combined the practical function of the port with the habit, so characteristic of Floripa (the local nickname for Florianópolis), of sitting facing the water and letting time pass.
The progress that rolled over it
On October 24, 1974, the Miramar was demolished. The city was in the middle of the South Bay landfill (the aterro da Baía Sul), a project that redrew the entire downtown waterfront and changed the relationship between Florianópolis and the sea itself. The pier, which existed precisely because the water reached that far, lost its purpose the moment the water was pushed away.
The official justifications varied. There was talk of a structural problem. There was also talk of a roadway that would run through there, a route that, in the end, never came. And there is the line that stuck: Governor Colombo Salles went so far as to say that the Miramar was frequented “by people of little standing.” The demolition of a city landmark justified, in part, by the company it attracted.
Why the Miramar was forgotten
The Miramar did not vanish by chance. It was erased by an idea of the future. The same landfill that swallowed the pier is the one that opened space for Avenida Beira-Mar Norte, one of the city’s postcard sights today. The Island gained an avenue and lost its pier. It gained a new landscape and lost the exact point where it once arrived and departed.
When a city grows fast, what remains tends to be whatever was built last. The Miramar belonged to another scale, another pace. It did not fit the city people wanted to have, and for decades almost no one spoke of it. It became a subject only for those old enough to remember.
Why this matters today
The 2001 memorial is at once moving and unsettling. The city acknowledged what it had lost, but the acknowledgment came as an outline on the ground, a floor plan without walls, a pier without water. It is the distance between having a place and having the memory of a place.
It is worth knowing this history before walking through downtown. It changes the way you look at the waterfront. Every landfill, every wide avenue facing the sea, holds beneath it a decision about what the city chose to keep and what it chose to let go.
At Regente, we believe that understanding Florianópolis from the inside is part of living well here. Knowing what once stood on the ground beneath your feet is a way of inhabiting the Island with more attention, and of recognizing, in today’s landscape, the choices of yesterday.
Memória da Ilha (Memory of the Island), a Regente series about the Florianópolis that lies beneath the one you see.
Also read: the history of Florianópolis.
