old empty and dilapidated

I take it that this is your only real experience with Brazil. It's like that everywhere not just in Iguaba Grande. It happens for a number of reasons, mostly bureaucratic or due to lack of planning before building. Sometimes it happens just because the builders have simply run out of money. You have to remember that it has only been very recently that personal financing has become available to Brazilians, even for mortgages.

A lot of these buildings, especially in rural areas, become abandoned because of financing and stay that way because they eventually sit on the tax rolls for so long that trying to recover them is a bureaucratic nightmare.

In many municipalities, especially those that exempt properties from IPTU (property taxes) once construction begins, people start anything just to free themselves from the taxes and then leave the property sit abandoned letting it appreciate in value.

There are more reasons than you can possibly imagine, but the end result is always the same, in a country where so many people lack decent housing there are places (even in São Paulo, South America's largest and richest city) that sit abandoned and should be taken over by the government and turned into some form of social housing.

Cheers,
James   Expat-blog Experts Team

It's even more heartbreaking a sight when the building in question is a new, fully equipped installation that is supposed to be a hospital or emergency clinic.

I know of two cases just like that where I used to live in Belo Horizonte - MG. A few blocks away from where I had an apartment there was a hospital, supposedly to treat children with HIV and AIDS, built, fully equipped with state of the art devices, it never opened because of squabbles between the city, state and federal governments. Cost over USD $12 million. It had high fences all around and guards 24 hours a day, and nobody ever passed through its doors. As far as I know it still sits empty after all these years. There was also a public health clinic in Venda Nova, built and equipped that sat unused for 3 years while the Ministry of Health and city squabbled over the water and sewer hook-ups.

Welcome to Brazil