Naufrágio Bellucia

The Bellucia was a 102 m, 2,728-ton steamship built in 1888 by the D&W Henderson shipyards in Glasgow for the Lamport & Holt company, and registered by Bell Brothers & McLelland. On the night of 15 February 1903, after a problem in the port boiler, the ship slowed down and struck the rocks of Rasa da Escalvada; once aground, it broke apart and was abandoned by the crew. In another version of the sinking, the ship was British, carried mainly coffee and was sailing from Santos to New Orleans when it sank, on the same date, after colliding with a shoal. It should not be confused with another Bellucia of the same company, from 1929, which was torpedoed by the German submarine U-332 in 1942 in the North Atlantic.

Today the hull lies broken in two at the boilers, with the bow resting against the rocks of the Rasa and the stern about 150 m away from it. On the wreck you can find black margates, groupers of more than one kind, pufferfish, scad, lobsters and octopuses. The best season tends to be from December to April.