The leaning towers of Santos
What is it that makes some of the tallest buildings in Santos lean like a stack of dominoes about to fall? Maximus Films hired Story Productions to help film the answer for an episode of German TV show Galileo on ProSieben.
The largest city on the São Paulo coast - Santos - is best known as a holiday destination, little more than an hour’s drive away from the state capital. Wedged between the Serra do Mar mountain range and the Atlantic Ocean, with a sweeping beach and the world’s largest beach garden, Santos offers a diverse choice of filming locations, as we explored in our recent guide to filming in Santos.
A little known but bizarre phenomenon in Santos is its wonky buildings lined up on the seafront. These buildings incline as much as two metres – giving the sensation when looking head on that they will might fall down in a domino effect at any given moment. There’s no concern on that front; the buildings are safe and home to hundreds of residents. Nevertheless, the phenomenon caught the attention of German TV series ‘Galileo’ – a popular youth science show broadcast on television network ProSieben.
Galileo sets out to answer important questions such as what can’t Brazilians live without and how oranges get from a farm in Brazil to a juice carton in Germany. In our latest shoot for Galileo, Story Productions was hired by Maximus Films to produce and shoot four episodes in four different cities, including In Pomerode, the most-German town in Brazil.
For the shoot in Santos, a small crew of 6 from Story Productions spent a day with a team from Maximus Films to film a series of locations, including the beach and inside one of the leaning buildings, where our Brazilian film crew interviewed some of the local residents, who said they had become used to the gentle slope. The team from Maximus included a Sina Hutt and Cedric Schmid, with whom the Story Productions crew was able to easily converse in German.
The programme explores the history of the leaning buildings that were built in the 1960s, when high-rise construction techniques were not what they are today. Although the buildings lie on solid clay-like sand, the lower layer is softer subsoil that is put under pressure by the weight of the buildings, causing them to tilt.
Santos has a lot more to its history than its leaning buildings. It is, in fact, one of Brazil’s oldest cities and home to Latin America’s largest port. It also has a thriving audiovisual scene, and is used by plenty of film and TV productions as the location for shoots set in Rio de Janeiro, thanks to its seafront vistas and colonial architecture.
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