The Last Football (Soccer) Post On This Blog Until 2014. (I Promise.)

Spain did it. They won the FIFA World Cup!

They squeezed the Orange dry, sunk the Flying Dutchman.

And a pall hangs over Holambra.

Here are some pictures of the place in happier times.

A product of one of the local industries.

Girls eating that great Dutch specialty, French-fried potatoes served in a paper cone with mayonnaise.

Dutchmen amusing themselves.

The largest windmill in Latin America.

Yeah, that’s right, Latin America.

Holambra, folks, isn’t in Europe.

It’s in Brazil, about a hundred and twenty kilometers from São Paulo.

And, as you can see, it’s full of Dutch folks.

How did that come about?

Well, it’s like this:

After the Second World War, things at home weren’t so good for many of the Dutch farmers.

Few people had money.

Banks weren’t providing loans to agriculture.

There was no market for crops and produce.

Brazil, meanwhile, was booming.

Land and cash were readily available.

So, in 1948, a deal was struck between a group of Dutch farmers and the Brazilian government.

The farmers got 5,000 hectares of land and set up a cooperative.

And the government was supposed to get a dairy industry.

It didn’t work.

The cattle brought from Europe didn’t do well in the Brazilian climate.

So the Dutch, nothing if they aren’t entrepreneurial, started looking around for something else they could do with the land.

They hit on the cultivation of flowers.

Today, Holambra (the name stems from the first three letters of Holland, the first two letters of America, and the first three letters of Brazil) is a city of about 9,000 and the center of Brazil’s floricultural trade.

Expoflora, the largest flower and ornamental plant show in Latin America takes place there each year in September. And attracts about 250,000 visitors.

In the quarter-finals of this year’s FIFA World Cup, many of the good citizens of Holambra  rooted for The Netherlands to knock out Brazil in the quarter-finals.

Which The Netherlands did.

Many of their neighbors, out of sheer schadenfreude, accordingly rooted for Spain to knock out Holland in the final.

Which they did.

Hence the pall that hangs over Holambra.

Today, there's just as much sadness there as in Amsterdam. (Well...almost.)

Leighton - Monday