As one of the world`s most beautiful cities and favourite beach Mecca for most Brazilians, Rio de Janeiro can fill up fast on a high season weekend. The city is notoriously short of rooms (it is said that a further 20,000 will be needed for the World Cup in 2014). When the hostels in Ipanema and Copacabana have long since put up their ‘lotado’ (full) signs and searches farther back into Lapa and Santa Teresa are not turning up any availability either, there is one final fallback you can rely on.

Few people consider Brazilian sex motels tempting holiday accommodation. Even to the average Brazilian they are places for elicit rendezvous that might take place over a few hours or, at most, a single night. Motels advertise by the hour or for a 12-hour overnight but you simply ask a rate for 24 hour stays, and a relatively inexpensive one can still be considerably cheaper than a room in a hostel. Even on a busy weekend when all else if booked there will be empty rooms at motels and there are benefits that few people would realize.

Most people arrive at a sex motel with a car and are able to park without being seen in what are usually private parking areas that give access directly to a room. A sign in the lobby warns you that ‘you are being filmed’…but it is assumed that that situation will change the moment you actually enter your room. (In the most secretive you simply ring a bell when you check out and a member of staff will arrive to accept your payment so that you are guaranteed not to see a single other person during your entire stay). Other motels simply have general underground parking and you check into your room as normal through a reception area.

On walking into the room you will see that there are a few marked differences to the average room in a hostel. In a sex motel you are unlikely to have ‘a room with a view’: big windows are frowned upon and balconies are rare since motel guests are typically keen to remain incognito. If you’re travelling solo a few of the usual benefits of a motel room might fall short: the large and/or numerous mirrors around the bed will be surplus to requirements as will the menu of sex toys that supplements the normal room-service menu. In all but the cheapest motel rooms there will also often be some sort of athletic looking sex chair and there will always be a porn channel on the TV.

A dorm bed in a good location in Rio will set you back around 50reais (about gbp18) so for two people a sex motel works out cheaper. For about the same as you would pay for a double room in an Ipanema hostel you could get a very nice suite in a Lapa motel, complete with minibar (champagne and Redbull) and Jacuzzi.  The clichéd image of stained sheets and grubby-vested janitors is pure fiction and service is usually good (and suitably un-intrusive). Motels are found throughout the city, not just relegated to the urban fringe, and Lapa – the samba-throbbing heart of Rio – has several good examples. Rooms are clean, well sound-insulated and spacious, and there is invariably a bigger shower than you would get in all but the more expensive hotels. One unexpected benefit can be in the breakfast (included in the room price) which is often generous, befitting guests who might have had more than the usual amount of exercise during the night. Motels will not have lounges or dining rooms so breakfast is always delivered to your room, into a separate entrance porch – a sort of decompression chamber from which your ‘inner sanctum’ is accessed. Or it might be served through a hatch in the wall so that room-service has no reason to enter your room.

With many young Brazilians living in the family home until late in their twenties, motels serve a clientele that goes way beyond the hackneyed image of predatorial bosses and cheating wives. But there is still a hint of cloak-and-dagger even in the most innocent stay in a Brazilian sex motel: when you check out you will notice that your credit card receipt details a payment made not to a motel but to the name of a non-existent restaurant.