Guests at the Love Lomas Pousada in the Amazon city of Belém receive an email from reception before check-in with two questions, one conventional, the other unforeseen.
“Could you kindly let us know what time you expect to arrive at our establishment,” the message reads. “And one other thing, our rooms feature erotic chairs. Would you like to have it removed?”
With less than three months until tens of thousands of climate negotiators, campaigners and diplomats flock to this sweltering riverside metropolis to discuss the future of the planet, Belém’s love motels are racing to remodel themselves to receive visitors from around the globe.
Ricardo Teixeira, the owner of Love Lomas, said a “de-eroticization” campaign was in full swing as motels – traditionally used for passionate rendezvous between lovers – stepped into the breach to help authorities cope with the huge influx of outsiders for November’s Cop30 summit.
Mirrored ceilings, pole dancing poles and sex chairs resembling a cross between a torture rack and a weight bench were being covered or removed. Mattresses were being changed and kitsch erotic artwork being stored away to ensure bashful conference-goers felt at home.
“There’s a certain stigma [attached to motels] … because they charge by the hour … but the only difference is that they’re mostly used for romantic liaisons,” said Teixeira, urging delegates to make a booking at his 48-room drive-in, just around the corner from Cop’s main venue and directly opposite the environment secretariat.
Teixeira insisted love-makers were not the only ones who frequented his motel, where bedside menus offer condoms and caipirinhas and there is a £1 surcharge for dirty sheets. During Covid, frontline health workers rented rooms to avoid infecting their families. Business travellers from the interior of Pará, a state the size of South Africa of which Belém is capital, sometimes used its air-conditioned chambers. “People still have the wrong idea about motels … that outdated image from TV and films that they are brothels,” complained Teixeira, who said visiting delegates were welcome to keep the erotic chairs, if they wished. “You never know, do you?”
The love motel community’s efforts to support the climate summit comes at a delicate moment for Brazil’s government which is facing a backlash over the failure to sufficiently improve Belém’s hotel infrastructure since President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced the city would host Cop30 two years ago. The lack of accommodation has caused a jaw-dropping surge in prices, with rooms hard to come by, even now. One report showed a budget hotel had hiked its rates from about £10 per night in 2023 to nearly £800 during the gathering, which is set to take place between 10 and 21 November.
Earlier this month Austria said its president and negotiators would not attend the Amazon’s first-ever Cop summit citing “particularly high costs”. Some diplomats have even suggested partially relocating the event although Brazilian officials insist there is no “plan B”.
In an open letter, the Climate Observatory watchdog warned the summit risked being “the most exclusionary in history” with civil society, representatives of developing nations and the press priced out. “A poorly attended Cop would be, as well as a historic humiliation for Brazil, a precious opportunity missed at a moment when we have just five years to keep the [Paris] climate agreement’s temperature target alive,” it said. So far, just 30% of the nearly 200 countries that are part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change have reportedly managed to confirm bookings in Belém.
Márcio Astrini, the Observatory’s director, voiced frustration that the lack of accommodation had supplanted the climate breakdown as the main topic of debate. “Fossil fuels is the key discussion we should have on the agenda right now … How is the world going to organize so there is a plan to transition away from fossil fuels?
“[But] to have a negotiation about transitioning … you need to have a room full of negotiators … If the negotiators are saying they won’t come, how are you going to negotiate these topics? It simply won’t happen,” Astrini said.
Addressing complaints over the lack of lodging earlier this year, Lula declared: “If there isn’t a five star hotel [available], sleep in a four-star one. If there isn’t a four-star one, sleep in a three-star one. If there isn’t a three-star one, sleep looking up at the stars … and it will be wonderful.” Authorities plan to deploy two cruise ships to serve as floating hotels for about 6,000 visitors.
Belém’s sex moteliers have another solution in mind for policy wonks, ambassadors and reporters struggling to find affordable beds. “They are welcome here,” enthused Teixeira, who is the regional representative of the Brazilian Motel Association. Teixeira said motel bosses had so far offered to make nearly 600 of their estimated 2,050 rooms available for the summit.
Cristiano Ribeiro, the 51-year-old owner of a motel called Só Prazer (Pleasure Only), has rented eight of its 33 rooms to Cop-goers through a government website. Guests will pay $200 a night, or $280 for rooms with jacuzzis.
Ribeiro’s father, a truck driver who migrated to Belém in the 70s, founded Pleasure Only in 1995 – the year Cop’s first meeting was held in Berlin. Initially called Ponto G (G-spot), the motel changed its name to Pleasure Only after a copyright complaint from a rival.
As he showed off his açaí palm-flanked premises, Ribeiro celebrated how Cop was transforming his culturally rich but economically disadvantaged home town. “It’s wonderful. We’ve progressed 30 years in one,” he said of the hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure investments that have turned much of the city into a construction site.
Ribeiro has paid a graffiti artist to cover his roadside motel with murals celebrating the Amazon’s wildlife and Indigenous peoples, hoping foreign visitors would enjoy their stay. By the time they arrived, the adult channels on its televisions would have been deactivated; the sex shop selling nurses’ costumes removed; and the laminated catalogues offering furry handcuffs and “Real Peter” dildos replaced by English-language menus offering food. Pole dancing poles could be used as coat hangers.
Climate negotiators would receive a warm reception. “We’ve all kinds of clients,” Ribeiro said as a pair of lovers swept into Pleasure Only on motorbike for a lunchtime romp. “We welcome them all.”
