With water on all sides, a boat glides under a cloudless blue sky. Behind him, tall trees paint the empty banks green, with no one around.
Yes, we are in São Paulo. More exactly 30 km from the center, in an initiative that takes residents and tourists to navigate the Billings dam, in the Grajaú region, in the extreme south of São Paulo.
Eight years ago, the Billings Boys project was created to offer tours and activities to raise environmental awareness. As the areas bordering the dam became a meeting point on weekends, Adolfo Duarte, better known as Ferrugem, decided to create a mixture of agency and socio-environmental initiative there.
At age 41, he was born in Grajaú and is an educator, river sailor and history teacher. In 2014, after his nine-year-old son died of cancer, Duarte began paddling a stretch of the dam. The way of experiencing grief gave rise to the first action of the project: Rowing in the Quebrada.
There, volunteer teachers met once a month to give canoeing and surfboard building workshops. The classes were attended by children from the neighborhoods Cantinho do Céu, Lago Azul, Monte Verde and Prainha, all nearby.
“We promote community-based tourism, in which people get to know the territory and who created it”, says Duarte.
The initiative grew and integrated other environmental education proposals for children and adolescents. That’s where boat trips come in — currently, the itineraries are held on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, by appointment via WhatsApp.
There are two package options. The most common costs R$50 per person and lasts for one hour. The itinerary includes a lesson about the region and the dam. The other option is to rent the entire boat. In this case, the value varies depending on the duration of the tour.
On some routes, it is also possible to pass Bororé Island — which is not exactly an island, but a Billings peninsula, where there is a municipal natural park surrounded by Atlantic forest. These tours usually take a whole day, with a visit to the historic part of Bororé and lunch included, with prices around R$120 per person.
The project has already received tourists from countries such as Egypt, Holland, Japan, China, Ghana and Ethiopia, for example. This is the case of the Belgian Lucas Salazar, 30. He met Grajaú after a friend participated in a project to build boats with recyclable materials in the region.
“It’s a place that has potential. I didn’t know it, I came for the tours”, he comments.
Conceived by the American engineer Asa White Kenney Billings in 1927, the dam was intended to generate electricity from a hydroelectric plant in Cubatão, on the coast of São Paulo. Today, it is a reservoir and supplies part of São Paulo and municipalities in the metropolitan region, such as São Bernardo do Campo and Rio Grande da Serra.
With the income from Meninos da Billings, Duarte develops other actions — among them, the construction of boats with PET bottles, ecological trash cans and woodworking workshops.
The idea is to transform the dam into an ecotourism hub. “By 2023, we want to complete the renovation of another boat and serve more people”, he says.
