I Spent Seven Months Inside Brazil's Most Notorious Red Light District

This article originally appeared on VICE Brazil

Vila Mimosa is one of the most notorious areas of prostitution in Brazil. While sex tourists visit Copacabana en masse, Vila Mimosa attracts a more local clientele. A few thousand women work in this neighbourhood in the north of Rio de Janeiro – estimations of the number of women varies between 2,000 and 3,500 – while the area claims to receive 4,000 visitors daily.

The neighbourhood is a network of dilapidated buildings, pool halls, shops and brothels posing as bars – prostitution isn't illegal in Brazil, but owning and running a brothel is. Behind the storefronts, you'll find thousands of tiny dark, almost suffocating rooms, where the prostitutes take their clients yet the area is also home to dozens of families. Walking around, you are constantly confronted by a parade of vermin, bums, drugs, thongs, bugs, breasts, dogs, women, men and babies running around in diapers. Trans people, however, are strictly forbidden from entering the neighbourhood.

Photographer Fábio Teixeira spent seven months in and around Vila Mimosa, trying to capture the neighbourhood's spirit for VICE Brazil. "I witnessed Vila Mimosa's world firsthand. It's a place of contrasts and extremes," he says.

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