This research aims to present another perspective of a critical looking at the idea and the place that nature assumes in the implementation and development of the subdivision of the Riviera de São Lourenço, mostly portrayed as a model of urban planning focused on second-home tourism and with strong environmental appeal. To achieve this objective, the research is based on office work and filed work, involving observation, photographic coverage and interviews with key actors linked to the enterprise. The mehod adopted is historical-dialectcal materialism, through wich is sought to illuminate contradictions involved in the process of implementation and development of Riviera. The following are forging elements and, therefore, constituents of the enterprise: the capitalist crises of 1970s and the consequent turn in the process of accumulation from an industrial fordist economy to a flexible and credit one where the production of space and real estate gains centrality; the process of redemocratization underway in the 1980s and; the environmental problem that emerges with force also with the fraying of the industrial economy in the second half of the twentieth century. The Riviera de São Lourenço, therefore, is the fruit of its time and space and not an insight nor a manifestation of benevolence towards the degradation of the environment. The rapid conversion of the undesirable results of the urban-industrial development process into a commodity that better responds to the new forms of capitalist accumulation has one of its best finished versions in the subdivision of the Riviera de São Lourenço. The investigation that follows highlights some of the internal and external contradictions of the enterprise, such as moral coercion, exotic vegetation, real estate speculation and the production of surrounding subnormal urban centers and that present themselves both as a product and as a condition that gives meaning and viability to the enterprise.