Before the contest, the place was called Porto das Jangadas, the port of the rafts, after the sail-rigged log craft that Ceara's fishermen still use. Later it was Praia do Peixe - Fish Beach - which is exactly as literal as it sounds, and describes what happened on the sand every morning. Until 1947 this was Fortaleza's working port. Cargo and passengers moved over the Ponte Metalica, a metal pier that handled the city's trade until the Port of Mucuripe opened farther east and made it redundant. The fishing rafts are still part of the iconography of the Ceara coast; the freight is long gone.

Walk out over the water on the Ponte dos Ingleses today and you are standing on an unfinished thought. Construction started on 24 September 1921 under the contractor Norton Griffiths Co. - the British firm behind the name Fortaleza still uses, the Englishmen's Bridge. Manuel Carneiro de Sousa Bandeira designed it as one element of an ambitious scheme for a port island, a concept that engineer Lucas Bicalho developed further. Work began during the presidency of Epitacio Pessoa and was suspended under his successor, Artur Bernardes, with the structure incomplete. It never functioned as a port for a single day. Instead it became the best free view in Fortaleza. In 1994 the state culture department approved a restoration; architects Fausto Nilo and Delberg Ponce de Leon added the timber structures now on the deck, and the pier carries a dolphin protection center and a tower for watching cetaceans offshore. Note that this is not the Ponte Metalica, a separate structure to the west that people persistently confuse it with.

The Magalhaes Porto family built a mansion here that did more to change the neighborhood than any city plan. The Estoril became the social center of Praia de Iracema, drawing Fortaleza's bourgeois families out to the beach and starting the district's modernization almost by accident. Then the Second World War arrived. American forces were stationed in Fortaleza, and the Estoril was turned into a casino for the troops. By the 1940s the neighborhood had the reputation it has never entirely shaken: bohemian, nocturnal, slightly disreputable, the place where the city goes to misbehave.

There is a cost to building a port next door. When Mucuripe went up in the 1950s, it altered how sand moved along this shore, and Praia de Iracema began to erode - not gradually enough to ignore. The beach that gave the neighborhood its name largely disappeared. The poet Luiz Assuncao gave the loss its epitaph, calling it a praia dos amores que o mar carregou, the beach of loves the sea carried away. It is a line locals still quote, and it does the work that statistics cannot: this was where people came to be young, and the ground itself went out with the tide.

In 1996 the city put up a statue of Iracema on the waterfront - not the dying, abandoned heroine of the novel's final pages, but Iracema a Guardia, the guardian, braced in a fighting stance with her bow. It is a pointed revision of Alencar's ending, and the neighborhood it watches over has been revised too. The old port zone was rebuilt as the Dragao do Mar Center of Art and Culture, and the State Public Library came with it, anchoring a district of bars, hotels and galleries that the city has designated a Bem de Relevante Interesse Cultural. The nightlife has run hot and cold across those decades, and the district has been reinvented more than once. The neighborhood, in the end, has outlived the beach that named it - which is a fittingly Alencarian outcome for a place named after a fictional woman.