The Arena da Amazônia sits on an elevated concrete plateau, overlooking a vista of car salesrooms, industrial warehouses and idle cement mixers parked in tidy rows. On World Cup gamedays, the roads are closed for blocks around, and fans are obliged to pass through two checkpoints staffed by military police before they even begin to negotiate the airport-style security in place at the actual stadium. Arrive early enough, before the fans, and a natural dip in the road makes it possible to look from horizon to horizon and see nothing much beyond checkpoints, uniforms and sweating, empty asphalt.

It is, in effect, almost entirely dislocated from its surroundings. From ground level, the industrial zoning is obscured by a wire-topped wall, on which Coca-Cola have daubed murals of happy floating manatees and Fuleco, the tournament mascot. What few residential and small-scale commercial properties there are inside the exclusion zone are making hay by selling cans of Brahma to ambling fans, but the majority of the surrounding buildings are shuttered and still. And even when the games aren't happening, and the uniformed officers have taken their checkpoints home, the buses rattle past a stadium circumscribed by a FIFA wrapping, the friendly blue colour and jaunty font doing nothing to mask the fact that this is a fence, and you are to stay on that side. Out there is Manaus. In here is FIFA-land ...

... which is, of course, exactly as might be expected. Sony are flogging televisions, Hyundai are flogging cars. Brahma and Coca-Cola are flowing freely. Crowds are queueing to meet Fuleco at the behest of some sponsor, and perhaps to personally pity the poor bastard who has to dress as a six-foot armadillo in the mesmerisingly sticky air. Men with klaxons sit on high chairs and bellow "Welcome to the jungle!" at passing fans. Budweiser's concession holds the only big screen, so anybody attempting to follow the earlier games must do so with a DJ throwing -- well, dropping -- shapes in front of the action, and with the distraction of several beautiful, vaguely unhappy-looking women in dangerously tight trousers doing their level best to dance without passing out.

At night, from the air, the city is a sprawling stain of light in a world of absolute darkness; by day, it seems lost and tiny amongst the boundless waters and the endless trees. (Getty Images) (Getty Images)

Outside FIFA's boundaries, Manaus feels in many ways like an impossible city. Deep in the rainforest, squashed between the dark waters of the Rio Negro to the south and the rainforest to the north, it is still largely inaccessible by road. Visitors either arrive by boat -- it's a bob of several days down the Amazon from the Atlantic -- or by plane. At night, from the air, the city is a sprawling stain of light in a world of absolute darkness; by day, it seems lost and tiny amongst the boundless waters and the endless trees.

All of which makes it by some distance the least likely city ever to play host to the World Cup. But while the teams drawn to play here spent the build-up fretting about the heat and the humidity -- in June, the former tends to hang around 90 Fahrenheit, while the latter spends its time between stupid and hilarious -- the concerns in the city centred around the spiralling costs of the event, and in particular the stadium. The Arena da Amazônia eventually cost some 220 million euros, a 67 million euro overspend. 75% of that money was provided by the federal government, and must be repaid over the next 20 years.

Like many of the other host cities, infrastructure improvements were promised and never delivered. The monorail system was abandoned before the ground was even broken, the entire top floor of the airport remained a building site throughout the tournament, and there were rumours that the stadium itself wouldn't be completed in time. Those rumours proved unfounded, but it later emerged that the rush to get the thing built involved the breaking of sixty-three out of sixty-four health and safety labour codes and, tragically, the deaths of up to three workers.

That Manaus ended up hosting the World Cup at all is down in no small part to the insistence of the Brazilian football association that the tournament's sixty-four games be spread across twelve cities, where FIFA mandates for a minimum of eight and a maximum of ten. Being generous, one might suggest that this is a perfectly reasonable step to take when attempting to host a tournament in a country the size of a continent, but in Futebol Nation the social historian David Goldblatt notes a number of political conveniences underlying the selection process:

"In the north both Manaus and Belém were in contention. Eduardo Braga, former governor of Amazonas, was on the rise, and seen as a future leader of the Senate, while Ana Julia Carepa, governor of Para where Belém is situated, was heading for electoral defeat. Manaus won over Belém."

It's not as if this is a city with nothing better to spend its money on. The natural destination for migrants from all over the rural Amazon, the city is unable to provide employment in commensurate numbers. Poverty and crime dog the city, healthcare is poor, the traffic worse, and much of the city's waste flows untreated into the Amazon. Though Manaus can boast shiny modern shopping malls and condominiums, these are juxtaposed with the empty husks of abandoned buildings and the improvised, unstable dwellings of the urban poor. Set against the city's needs, and even before the deaths are taken into account, the sums spent on the stadium start to look less unwise and more grotesque.

June 14, and two former World Champions came to the forest. England were trepidatious, worried about the heat and the form of their undroppable but uninspiring Wayne Rooney; Italy were a side of uncertain potency, which generally means anything from total disaster to total victory. Both teams left in good heart, Italy having won the game, England having lost but in a manner deemed stylistically acceptable, even encouraging. Both teams went on to lose their next match; neither would make it out of their group.

(Getty Images) (Getty Images)

For years just a small sleepy river port, Manaus became a city in the second half of the nineteenth century as the rapidly industrialising world sought the one resource that nowhere but the Amazon could give: rubber. Needed to keep engines a-pumping, pipes a-piping, shield electric wires from a-frazzling and send first bicycles and later cars a-rolling, it was crucial, it was big business, and it was almost all Amazonian; by 1900, 95 percent of the world's supply came from the South American rainforest.

It was gathered from the forest by itinerant seringuieros who spent their lives sleeping in improvised shacks, with rubber smoke eating away at their lungs and mosquitos feasting on their blood. Everybody else, though, was getting paid. As the money flooded in, Manaus began to prettify and glamourise itself. At its height, it could boast an electric tram system, one of Brazil's first telephone networks, rowing clubs, a bull-ring, department stores and brothels staffed by elite courtesans from the Old World, a mimickry of a modern European city deep in the heart of the forest. Everything was louche, everything was glorious. And the pinnacle of this reinvention, the "jewel" at the heart of the booming city, was the grand opera house, the Teatro Amazonas.

Built over 15 years for an at-the-time obscene $2 million, the Teatro was constructed entirely from imported materials with the exception of locally-sourced hardwoods, though naturally they were sent to Europe for polishing. It was a place to see but also to be seen, for the cream of Manaus society to flaunt their wealth and their taste in both culture and clothes. Capping the entire edifice was an enormous, glimmering dome in green, yellow and blue, lined with 36,000 ceramic tiles brought over from Alsace, France. It was -- and now, in its restored state, is again -- a ridiculous, nonsensical, brilliant building, the crowning glory of a city built on the understanding that the good times are here and they are never going away.

But they did. Of course they did. All bubbles burst; that's what they do. In 1876, an Englishman called Henry Alexander Wickham transported -- or, if you're Brazilian, stole -- 70,000 rubber-tree seeds from the Amazon to London. He was later knighted for services to colonial larceny, and by the 1920s English were pumping rubber out of Malay and Singapore at a faster rate and in greater quantities than the Amazon could manage. The region's economy collapsed, the rich of Manaus fled back to Europe or moved onto Brazil's other major cities, and the workers they abandoned took up residence in the periphery of the crumbling city. The "Paris of the Tropics" was done.

As goes the city, so goes its opera house, and the Teatro closed its doors in 1925. While it may have worked as a location for the wealthy to practice the important business of being obviously wealthy in one another's company, it never fulfilled its purpose as an opera house. Local legend claimed that Enrico Caruso, Sarah Bernhardt and Anna Pavlova all performed at the Teatro, but the opera house's own records disagree. The great stars of Europe and America were apparently dissuaded by the not-unreasonable fear of death and disease; the orchestras by the logistics of the river and the forest. In all the Teatro held precisely one full-scale grand opera, Ponchielli's La Gioconda. And that, in an echo of the four-games-then-we're-gone World Cup, was the opening night.

June 19, and two teams desperate for points came to the forest for their second game. Croatia went about things in the traditional fashion, focusing their efforts on the scoring of goals. Cameroon took a more maverick angle; first Alexandre Song was sent off for one of the weirdest elbows football has ever seen, then Benoit Assou-Ekotto attempted to put the head on one of his own teammates. The traditionalists walked away four-goal winners, but both teams went on to lose their next match. Neither would make it out of their group.

"Arena Cumpriu Seu Papel Mas, E Agora?" The Stadium Did Its Job, Now What?

On June 27, two days after the final game at the Arena da Amazônia, the headline of Manaus' Em Tempo newspaper read: "Arena Cumpriu Seu Papel Mas, E Agora?" The Stadium Did Its Job, Now What? The World Cup came to the rainforest, eight teams flew in, played, flew out again, leaving the Arena behind. Manaus' largest professional side Nacional will take over tenancy, but they are a small club that last competed at the top level of Brazilian football in 1985, and are currently knocking around in Serie D. In short, all the evidence suggests that the Arena will settle down in the heat and slowly transform into the emblematic animal of the modern sporting super-event: the white elephant.

Which would in itself be another minor tragedy to add to the list. The stadium is beautiful, and is not only beautiful but designed in a manner entirely antithetical to FIFA's ring of steel, its four-fold checkpointing. The shell, patterned after a distinctive regional basket, only touches the ground every twenty yards or so, allowing the fans to amble near-seamlessly from inside to outside and back again. Some stadiums are constructed along clearly delineated egress and ingress points; this, by contrast, is a stadium virtually without doors, with walls that hold the thing up but do nothing else. It is mildly and pleasantly discombobulating.

This is best experienced not on entry but upon departure. The uniforms are still present, of course, standing in serried rows by the side of the street, motionless-yet-conspicuous in that way that comes so easily when dressed in military fatigues and holding a riot shield. But the progress of the departing fan, from seat through stadium to open air, down the concrete ramps and into the street, is really quite something, an object lesson in how stadium design (and, indeed, other aspects of communal urban design) need not operate on a basis that the outside is the outside, the inside the in, and the border between the two is a thing to be tightly patrolled. Anathema to the modern conception of sporting mega-events, of course, where crowds are things to be tolerated, controlled, and gently milked for cash; where security concerns are the only concerns; where a crowd attending a game in the rainforest heat may carry neither sunscreen nor bug spray.

June 22, and the USA and Portugal serve up a stone-cold belter. Buoyed by the support of the locals, the Portuguese take an early lead, but an army of travelling Americans holler their side back into contention. Two USA goals turn the game on its head, and with Cristiano Ronaldo concentrating less on football and more on waggling his arms at his teammates, the Americans can almost taste the next round ... until Michael Bradley loses the ball in the very last minute, Ronaldo remembers how to cross, Silvestre Varela briefly confuses himself with a brilliant footballer, and it ends two apiece. The USA, though they went on to lose their next match, qualified for the second round; the Portuguese, despite winning theirs, went home.

(Getty Images) (Getty Images)

With the British in firm control of the natural rubber industry, Manaus languished until the mid-1960s, when the Brazil's military government declared Manaus a 'free trade zone'. Multinational manufacturers, lured by the promise of low taxes and cheap labour, descended on the city, transforming the fringes into a giant industrial park. Over the years, the incursion of foreign investment has inspired another population boom, and from just under 200,000 in the 1960s, the city's current population sits at around 2 million.

And as the city awoke and expanded, so too did the Teatro. During its fallow years. it had undergone four distinct renovations, some more successful than others. It had been painted pink, grey, and pink again. It had played host, in various states of dereliction and abandonment, to private parties, high-school graduations and at least one game of football. Then, finally, it reopened as both a tourist attraction and a functioning theatre and an opera house. The first Amazonas Opera Festival opened in 1997, has been held every year since, and has been joined in the annual program by festivals celebrating jazz, dance, and the indigenous music of the Amazon. Events are plentiful, and tickets are relatively cheap.

This rebirth does not, of course, mean that the good times are back for everybody. Manaus's second economic boom is typical of the times, in that the majority of the money mysteriously fails to find its way to the majority of the people. A festival of jazz won't ameliorate anybody's health problems, an opera won't transform the poverty-stricken areas that rub up against the beach-side apartments, the warehouses, and the assembly plants of the multinationals. And not every abandoned building is afforded the same reverence; turn any corner from the immaculate Placa de São Sebastião, the square dominated by the looming Teatro, and you'll soon find an empty shell of a building, poured concrete and crumbling masonry being gnawed away, slowly but surely, as the rainforest reclaims its land.

The oppressive realities of the city's economics persist, but in amongst it all stands what was once the ultimate vanity project, but is now an advertisement for Manaus at its best (Getty Images) (Getty Images)

Yet the symbolic value should not be understated. The Teatro has been repurposed for the benefit not of the wealthy who created it then fled once the circumstances changed, but for the ordinary population (or at least, some of the ordinary population), who had no choice otherwise but to live with it. The oppressive realities of the city's economics persist, but in amongst it all stands what was once the ultimate vanity project, but is now an advertisement for Manaus at its best: beautiful, incongruous, and ever-so-slightly ridiculous in the best possible way.

June 25. Honduras 0-3 Switzerland. The last game of the Arena's World Cup sees Xherdan Shaqiri, the barrel-chested Swiss wunderkind, take a willing, limited, and ever-so-slightly violent Honduras side to pieces. The Europeans progress to a knock-out game against Argentina; the Hondurans go home, pointless. The atmosphere in the stadium is celebratory and jubilant. One banner proclaims: "Finally The World Had Found Us".

Not all white elephants are made alike. Repurposing the 700-seat Teatro is one thing; finding a regular use for a plus-40,000-seat stadium quite another. But while Nacional have never troubled the upper reaches of Brazilian football, this remains a town as football-mad as any in Brazil. The streets are dominated by replica shirts, either of the national team or one of Rio de Janeiro's four major clubs. (By an unscientific tally of shirts, graffiti and flags, Flamengo are the most popular, their rivals Fluminense the least.) At noon on the day the USA played Portugal, directly underneath the blazing midday sun, a group of middle-aged men with distinctly middle-aged figures were settling in for a day's football in a dusty cage in the residential area of Petropolis.

Beyond that, Manaus is host to one of the world's strangest and most distinctive football tournaments, the Peladão. (Most attempted translations end up settling for 'the Big Kickabout') First held in 1973, teams aren't just represented by an eleven-man football team but by a beauty queen as well, who competes in her own pageants. Should a side find themselves knocked out in the conventional manner, there is still a chance that a strong showing for their queen could see them reinstated in the tournament. A record 1,211 teams competed in the 2010 edition, and in recent years a women's bracket has been installed alongside the typical men's competition, ensuring that the women of Manaus aren't entirely confined to their swimsuits.

Typically held on improvised pitches all over the city and the state, the thought of the Peladão finding some kind of home in FIFA's fruit basket is an amusing, deeply appealing one. Nothing could be less FIFA than this chaotic melange of teams drawn from workplaces, from social clubs, from churches, even exclusively from the overweight, of all standards and ages, bustling their way into a final in the same stadium that Cristiano Ronaldo once graced with his stroppy presence. (Though Sepp Blatter would doubtless be much in favour of the beauty queens.) Such is the standing of this tournament in the region that young aspirant footballers have been known to reject professional contracts in favour of retaining their eligibility, and it proves beyond doubt that Manaus does do football. Just not quite the same way as everybody else.

Are there uses beyond football? It might not seem likely that many of the world's stadium-touring superstars will find time in their itinerary for a stop in the rainforest -- except Sting, and no city deserves that -- but there is evidence that any band or pop star that find their way into the jungle will be richly rewarded. In 2005, the White Stripes played a one-off gig in Manaus, and were watched not just by a rammed Teatro but on big screens by a horde of fans in the packed square outside. If it was a combination of expense, logistics and the risk of disease that kept Caruso, Pavlova and Bernhardt away in the early twentieth century, then the advent of malaria pills and reliable air travel mean that these days the biggest hurdle is, perhaps, a simple lack of imagination.

Manaus's mayor, Artur Vigilio Neto, is certain that plenty of rock stars are keen to play in the Arena. But he is also keen to see the Arena privatised. The worry with such a plan is that the Arena would be subsumed into the fabric of the other Manaus, the one that has a bit of money floating around, just another part of the shiny veneer that sits on top of a troubled city. Plenty of the city's population were priced out of the football; there were noticeable demographic divides between those that could pay to attend the games, and those that spent their tournament at the free fan fests and big screens. Private investment, by its very nature, would likely enforce that divide; public money, on the other hand, has better and more vital things to be doing.

It's a city in a bind, put there by the vanity of men in suits. Yet it's hard not to be cautiously optimistic after spending time in the city. Every day of the World Cup, two proud comperes take to a stage in Place de Sao Sebastiao and remind the crowd that it is Manaus -- not Rio de Janeiro, say their beaming smiles, not São Paulo -- that is hosting the most "World Cup cultural presentations" for its people and its visitors. Manaus may not have needed the World Cup, and it may not have been able to afford it, but it put its best face on nonetheless. Left to its own devices, it shouldn't be too much of a shock if the city finds a way to kill itself a white elephant, then build something better for themselves from the corpse. After all, this is the impossible city, and they've done it before.