Brigitte Bardot in Búzios: the 1964 Story

Brigitte Bardot in Búzios, the whole story: why she came in 1964, the two houses, why she never returned, the statue, and the flowers the day she died.

At six in the evening the light on the Orla Bardot goes gold and the fishing boats sit still on the bay. A small line forms beside a bronze woman on a suitcase. She looks at the sea and the people take turns sitting next to her. Most of them know one thing about her: that she came here once, a long time ago, and that after her nothing was the same. We have hosted guests at our home above Ferradurinha since 2012. Almost every one of them comes back from town with that photo and the same question. So here is the story, with the dates, the two houses, what she said about the place fifty years later, and what the town did the morning she died. For the rest of Búzios, start with our complete Búzios travel guide.

The short answer. Brigitte Bardot came to Búzios in January 1964, at 29, to escape the press in Rio. She stayed three and a half months in a borrowed house at Manguinhos, came back for one Christmas, and never returned. The photographers who followed her showed a fishing village to the world, and the tourists came after. The statue went up in 1999. She died on 28 December 2025, and the town laid flowers at it the same morning.

Every date and quote below links to its source, most of them Brazilian and French reporting from 1964 to 2026.

Why the name is on everything

Walk the town for a day and you will read her name a dozen times: the Orla Bardot, the Gran Cine Bardot, a bar, a restaurant, one of the schooners. The cinema’s owner put it to a reporter this way in January 2026: she is everywhere here, “like Fidel Castro in Cuba”. The reason is simple and the town says it plainly. Before January 1964 Búzios was a fishing district of Cabo Frio with a few hours of generator light a night. After that summer it was the place where Brigitte Bardot had hidden, and the world knew what it looked like.

The nickname came with it. She had already turned Saint-Tropez from a fishing port into the most famous beach town in Europe. When the photographers found her here, the Brazilian papers wrote the same story again. Búzios has been the Saint-Tropez of Brazil ever since. She made the comparison herself, fifty years later, in a letter you will read below.

Búzios and Bardot, at a glance

January 1964: how she got here

She landed in Rio on 7 January 1964 in a black wig, and the wig did not work. Fans and photographers were on the runway before the plane stopped. She left the airport without her luggage. A crowd camped outside the apartment on Avenida Atlântica for about seventy-two hours, until the doorman took the handle off the front door. A lawyer even filed a legal petition on her behalf without asking her. The judge refused it: the courts could not forbid the press from being interested.

So her boyfriend made a deal. At a press conference in the Copacabana Palace on 10 January she told the reporters she would trade all of it for “one day of complete peace and quiet”. Three days later she climbed into a van and drove out of the city to Búzios, about 180 kilometres up the coast. It was a village almost nobody in Rio could have placed on a map.

The quiet months at Manguinhos

The house belonged to a friend of Zagury’s who worked for the United Nations in Brazil, a red-roofed house on the beach at Manguinhos, with no phone and no running water. She spent the months on boats and on the beaches of Manguinhos and João Fernandes. A diver who stayed with the couple remembered that when they came back with fish, she cooked for everyone.

What made it work was the village. The fishermen became her friends, and when they saw reporters coming, they warned her and she hid. Nobody here had a cinema, so, in the words of the woman who later gave her a room, “she was a pretty blonde, but nobody knew she was famous”. A fisherman’s son, interviewed decades later for the town’s own history, remembered the crowd behind her on the sand. What people were saying: “My God, a naked woman on the beach.” She was in a bikini.

The press did find her, of course. Her truce with them was a set of photographs she chose herself. A friend of Zagury’s named Denis Albanese took them, and they were handed to the Brazilian magazines in exchange for being left alone. Those are the pictures the world saw, and one of them is the statue. A photographer sent from Rio to find her described what he found instead: “Búzios was a place of wild nature. There was no piped water, no restaurants, no inns” to house the crowd of reporters and the curious who had come for the blonde. She left Brazil at the end of April, a few weeks after the coup that changed the country.

December 1964: why she never came back

She tried once more. On 18 December 1964 she came back for Christmas and New Year. This time she stayed in the small house of an Argentine couple, Ramón and Marcela Avellaneda, on the dirt track that is now Rua das Pedras. Marcela bought a pig for Christmas dinner. Bardot’s answer, as Marcela told it at 92: “Don’t even think about it, we are not eating him.”

This time the papers knew she was coming. More than forty reporters and photographers turned up in a village with no hotel, and the stay that was meant to be a rest became something to get through. She left on 8 January 1965 for Mexico and a film, and she never came back to Búzios. The Avellanedas turned their house into the Hotel del Sol in 1972. It is the Pousada do Sol today, at the top of Rua das Pedras, and Marcela kept the bedroom as it was.

What she said about Búzios

Fifty years passed. Then, in November 2014, a handwritten letter arrived from her house in Saint-Tropez for a film festival at the Gran Cine Bardot. The town put it on a screen in the main square. In it she wrote that it was in this small, lost, unknown town that she had been happiest. There was nothing, she said, not even electricity, but sublime and wild landscapes, and deserted beaches, dream beaches. She named two of them, Ferradura and João Fernandes, in her own spelling. And she added the line the town still quotes: today Búzios has changed, like Saint-Tropez, and become a fashionable resort known all over the world.

In her memoirs she went further, and shorter: perhaps the most beautiful days of my life were spent in Búzios.

The Orla and the statue

In 1999 the town rebuilt its seafront in stone, renamed it the Orla Bardot, and put up a bronze of her to open its first film festival. The sculptor was Christina Motta, commissioned by the culture secretary of the day, who also owns the cinema. Motta worked from the Albanese photographs of that summer. She has said she made the Brigitte of Búzios, not the movie star: hair loose, sitting on a suitcase, looking at the water. Her other bronzes are along the same walk, the three fishermen hauling a net in the shallows and the president who summered here.

Bardot did not care for it. Motta, at 81, told a reporter after her death that she protested that nobody had asked her permission. The town cared for it more. When vandals tied it to a car and dragged it off in November 2005, it was repaired, made heavier, and back in place within the month. By Google’s count the Orla is now the fifth most photographed place in the state of Rio. On the statue’s page, one visitor from Nottingham put it well in April 2026: a lovely photo, and you may have to wait your turn.

28 December 2025

She died on a Sunday, at home in Saint-Tropez, aged 91. By eleven that morning, Búzios time, the town’s tourism and culture secretaries were at the statue with the sculptor and whoever happened to be walking past. They laid flowers on the bronze and gave her a round of applause, and the tourists stopped to hear the story. For the next weeks the statue became the place people came to say thank you.

The town’s official note that day was careful, and we think it got the balance right. Her visit, it said, put Búzios into a new context of visibility, with effects that last to this day. But the history of Búzios was built by its community, its fishermen and its traditions, and she was not its founder. Both things are true. The photographs of that summer, taken by a local researcher named José Wilson Barbosa, now sit in the town’s memory centre for good.

What the fame cost

A quiet house should say this part too. The road was paved in the late 1970s and the Argentines came in their thousands. The fishermen’s families were pushed out to the far beaches as the centre was bought up. The peninsula she loved for its empty beaches now takes 160,000 visitors on a January long weekend. She saw it coming, which is why the 2014 letter says “like Saint-Tropez”. The town kept one rule that she would have liked: no building on the seafront rises more than two floors, and the fishing boats are still in the bay.

What we see from the house

The walk our guests take is the one in the story, in reverse. Down Rua das Pedras past the Pousada do Sol at the top of it, along the Orla to the statue, then on past the three fishermen to Praia dos Ossos. It is a slow hour, best started around six. From our terrace on the hill you look at the same bay she looked at from Manguinhos, with the town’s lights along it after dark. Manguinhos itself is still the calm side, the place we send guests who want a paddle board and a quiet beach.

The Búzios she described in her letter, the wild one with no electricity, is gone, and nobody honest will sell it to you. What is left is the shape of it. The coves are still small and the water at Azeda and Tartaruga is still clear. A house on a hill at the end of a road can still be silent at night. That is the Búzios we live in. The four suites at Casalita look out over it, and the dates are on Airbnb.

Come and see it

Take the photo. Everyone does, and she would have understood, since she chose the pictures herself. Then walk on along the water, find a table for the sunset, and remember that the best thing she ever said about this town was that it had nothing. Some of that nothing is still here, if you come in the right month and sleep on the right hill.

Read this next: Rua das Pedras, the street, the night and the food, and things to do in Búzios, what we send guests to first.