Qualla: Macaé

Macaé: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Masajualves, CC BY-SA 4.0. They call it the City of Petroleum. Cidade do Petróleo. Macaé, 180 kilometers northeast of Rio de Janeiro along the Atlantic coast, is where the helicopters take off for the Campos Basin oil rigs offshore - a small city that became, almost overnight, the onshore headquarters for Brazil's largest offshore oil industry. Since 1997, its economy has grown 600 percent. Its population has tripled since Petrobras opened operations here in the 1970s. An expatriate community of about a thousand people, mostly English speakers, has settled around the oil and gas trade. A Norwegian sister-city relationship with Stavanger, itself an oil boomtown, is not coincidence. What was a small fishing and tourism village fifty years ago is now one of the fastest-growing cities in Brazil.

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Image: Masajualves | CC BY-SA 4.0

Macaé: Before the Oil

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Masajualves, CC BY-SA 4.0. Macaé was here long before the derricks. The town was established in 1813, a fishing port and colonial outpost on the mouth of the Macaé River, and it stayed that way for more than a century and a half. Tourism and fishing made most of its revenues through the 1970s. Its beaches ...

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Image: Masajualves | CC BY-SA 4.0

Macaé: Petrobras Arrives

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Masajualves, CC BY-SA 4.0. The transformation began in the 1970s when Petrobras, the Brazilian state oil company, chose Macaé as its base for operations in the Campos Basin - the massive offshore petroleum field about 100 kilometers off the coast. The Campos Basin would become Brazil's main source of domes...

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Image: Masajualves | CC BY-SA 4.0

Macaé: The Numbers of a Boom

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Masajualves, CC BY-SA 4.0. The statistics are startling. The economy has grown 600 percent since 1997. The tax generation of new jobs grew 13.2 percent per year, the highest in the interior of Rio de Janeiro state. Per-capita GDP in 2007 reached R$37,667, 200 percent above the national average. Average sal...

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Image: Masajualves | CC BY-SA 4.0

Macaé: The Forest That Remains

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RICARDO HALECK, CC BY-SA 4.0. Growth has not erased the older Macaé entirely. The municipality still holds part of the Central Rio de Janeiro Atlantic Forest Mosaic of conservation units, created in 2006. It contains part of the União Biological Reserve, which protects a population of endangered golden lion t...

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Image: RICARDO HALECK | CC BY-SA 4.0

Macaé: A City Not Like the Others

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Masajualves, CC BY-SA 4.0. Macaé is one of the stranger cities in Brazil. A port town with English-speaking bars because the oil rigs run on English. A fishing coast where helicopters outnumber fishing boats in the harbor at dawn. A sister city to Stavanger in Norway and Fara Filiorum Petri in Italy, the t...

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Image: Masajualves | CC BY-SA 4.0