The German Football Federation would like to be clear about one thing. "Campo Bahia was not built by us, for us or in accordance with our requirements." The DFB has repeated that sentence often enough that it has stopped sounding like a clarification and started sounding like a disclaimer. And yet in June 2014 the German national team moved into this cluster of fourteen brightly painted houses in a fishing village on the Bahian coast, lived there for a month, and went home with the World Cup. The place has been trying to explain its own relationship to that fact ever since.
The village of Santo André sits on the Atlantic coast in the municipality of Santa Cruz Cabrália, about eight kilometres north of Santa Cruz Cabrália itself and thirty north of Porto Seguro. It is a small place, reached by a river crossing, with sand streets and a beach that runs for kilometres. Onto its edge a German property consortium led by the Munich entrepreneurs Christian and Christiane Hirmer dropped fifteen thousand square metres of resort: fourteen two-storey buildings holding sixty-five residential units, a fitness centre, a restaurant, a pool area, a training pitch and a short walk to the water. Completion was scheduled for March 2014. Reports at the time suggested it would not be ready at all, and in the end the builders finished it days before the team landed on 8 June.
German newspapers gave the place a nickname that explains the whole idea: the Deutschland-WG, the Germany shared flat. A Wohngemeinschaft is a student houseshare, and the point of Campo Bahia was that the squad would live in houses together rather than distributed down the corridors of an anonymous team hotel, cooking, eating and arguing in shared rooms with the sea outside. It was an unusual bet for a tournament base, and it worked well enough that DFB president Wolfgang Niersbach called it the best World Cup base of all time. The team stayed from 8 June to 11 July 2014, then left for Rio de Janeiro. Two days later they beat Argentina in the final at the Maracanã. Whether a beach houseshare wins you a World Cup is unprovable, and unprovable stories are the ones that stick.
The location looked eccentric and was actually arithmetic. Germany's group matches were in Salvador, Fortaleza and Recife, all within roughly two hours' flying, and Porto Seguro's airport is a short trip down the coast, so the squad could sleep in the same bed for a month instead of touring the country. The Bahian coast also delivered the heat and humidity they would face on the pitch, letting the players acclimatise rather than adapt mid-tournament. Isolation, which is a problem for a resort, is an asset for a security detail. There is a historical accident in it too. This stretch is the Discovery Coast, and Coroa Vermelha, where Cabral's fleet came ashore in 1500 and where a cross was raised in 2000 to mark the site of the first Mass in Brazil, lies just down the same shoreline.
Purpose-built tournament infrastructure usually ends badly, and Brazil in 2014 produced some famous examples of stadiums with nobody left to fill them. Campo Bahia did not go that way. It still stands on Avenida Beira Mar in Santo André and operates commercially as the Campo Bahia Hotel Villas Spa: private villas, a spa, a restaurant called Flor de Caju, beach tennis courts, weddings and corporate events. Coverage in 2014 also described plans for a football youth academy and an orphanage on the site; the resort's own marketing today describes neither, and there is no clear public record of either being built. What is odder is the silence about the rest. Browse the hotel's website and you will not find the German national team, the summer of 2014, or the trophy. A village built for one month of football has quietly become a place that would rather sell you the beach.
Campo Bahia sits at 16.24°S, 39.01°W, on the beachfront at Santo André in the municipality of Santa Cruz Cabrália, Bahia. Porto Seguro Airport (ICAO SBPS, IATA BPS) is roughly 30 kilometres south and was the squad's link to group matches in Salvador, Fortaleza and Recife, each about two hours' flying away. From 1,500-3,000 feet the coastline here is a long straight run of pale sand backed by coconut palms and low green cover, broken by river mouths; the resort reads as a tight cluster of pitched roofs right on the beach, with a rectangular training pitch beside it - an unusually geometric shape on an otherwise informal stretch of shore. Easterly trade winds are constant, and the November-to-March wet season brings the afternoon buildups and humidity that made this a useful acclimatisation base in the first place.