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From Rio, the Cidade do Aco bus company runs a service along the BR-116 to VOLTA REDONDA and the heartland of Brazil's steel industry. Situated on the banks of the River Paraiba , the city is dominated by steel mills, and though it may once have been a picturesque little village it's now an expanding industrial monster. If you want to visit the steel mill , you need to arrange the guided tour about a week in advance, either with the headquarters of the Companhia Siderurgica Nacional, Avenida XIII de Maio, Rio de Janeiro, or locally at the Hotel Alta Bela Vista (tel 024/348-2022; $50-70). Tour buses organized by the Companhia Siderurgica leave from Rio and travel direct to the mills; the journey takes about three hours and the price is negligible. If you want to stay in the town centre, apart from the Bela Vista, there's the Sider Palace Hotel at Av. Alberto Pasqualini 10 (tel 024/348-1032; $35-50), and the Embaixador at Travessa Luis Augusto Felix 36 (tel 024/348-3665; $20-35). Volta Redonda serves as a textbook example of the (often disastrous) way that Brazil is developing, economically and socially. To all intents and purposes, the city has been a company town since 1941, and the urban structure represents the priorities of the company - slums for the poor and nice neighbourhoods for the management sprawl on opposite sides of the river. The river itself is so polluted by industrial and domestic effluence that its plant and animal life have been almost completely destroyed. Apart from industrial conflict and pollution, according to a report in the Jornal do Brazil the citizens of Volta Redonda also have to cope with the highest incidence of hypertension and deaths caused by cardiovascular disease in the country. All this in what four decades ago must have been one of the healthiest climates in Brazil.
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