It is just days before the World Cup kicks off, and Brazil’s one million sex workers are preparing to cash in.
Unfinished stadiums are furiously being revamped, chaotic public transport is being desperately tweaked, tourist-targeting businesses are gearing up and prostitutes are taking free English classes.
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Brazil has long been considered a popular erotic destination for those seeking sexual experiences abroad, now, the country's street workers are making sure they take advantage of the big event.
More than 3.7 million football fans are this week expected to flood Brazil, where prostitution is legal.
These images, taken this week in the Vila Mimosa prostitution zone, show a darker reality of what will be happening off pitch during the World Cup.
Brazil's Sex Workers
In downtown Belo Horizonte are 23 brothels, known as zonas, hidden up narrow staircases and between grim-looking shops, The Independent has reported.
A number of the zonas’s sex workers are getting English classes from a volunteer to cash in on the six matches the city’s Mineirão stadium will host.
“For sure [the city’s prostitutes] will get more money with the World Cup,” a desk worker at a union for sex workers told The Independent.
“In the nightclubs they’ll be earning a lot. It’s normal for foreign guys to look for them, they always do, and now there’ll be more foreign guys. They’ll do very well.”
Reports have also provided more horrifying accounts of other preparations underway across Brazil.
Children are being forced to sell themselves for sex on the streets of Brazil to cash in on the waves of football fans heading to the World Cup.
A Sunday Mirror investigation last year revealed how hundreds of poverty stricken children, some aged just 11, are being sold to workers building Sao Paulo’s showcase World Cup ground.
