Survivor SA Santa Carolina's haunting, secret (and sad!) island past REVEALED!

Survivor SA Santa Carolina has a haunting, secret, sad and fascinating island past that I can reveal RIGHT NOW!

You're reading it here first.

When I broke the news first of the setting of this 3rd season of Survivor SA with THIS STORY right HERE on 16 November, I did a huge amount of research right away on the exotic island locale. I was immediately fascinated by this wonderful place.

Survivor SA Santa Carolina starts on Wednesday 20 January 2010 at 19:30 on M-Net and is set on Ilha Santa Carolina or now better known as Paradise island off the coast of Mozambique.

Paradise Island is FULL of secrets of its own, a SAD history, an abandoned hotel (you can see it in the picture above), a lonely famous piano, an abandoned airstrip, beautiful unspoiled beaches and is filled with mysteries and a rich adventurous history that even includes a drug smuggler . . . and a new hope for the future!

Click on READ MORE below for your Survivor SA Santa Carolina HISTORY LESSON 1 - The ghosts of Paradise Island!

Survivor SA Santa Carolina History Lesson:

 The ghosts of Paradise Island!

Among palm trees - some of them more than a century old - encircled by pristine beaches with little waves lapping at the shore, lies Paradise Island, a scandal-ridden exotic island on the coast of the Indian Ocean and a history filled with extravagant parties where the well-heeled sipped champagne, but also the devastation and decay of brutal civil war. . . and even drug smuggling.

Paradise Island, known among the locals also by it's former name of Ilha Santa Carolina, has 3 beaches, is close to beautiful coral reefs and also has a decaying edifice heralding it's former glory days: the Santa Carolina Hotel . . . now nothing but ruins.

It's in this hotel  (now completely vandalized) with about a 100 rooms or so that Bob Dylan composed his song Mozambique on a piano that now longingly and patiently awaits its return to Paradise Island. The Rani hotel group plans to return to Paradise Island in the future with a new hotel resort venture, and the piano will return. Someday.

The deserted island - off limits but for brief visits by tourists - after an ''unofficial'' decree by FRELIMO, belonged to a notorious arms and drug smuggler until very recently. He sold the island to the Rani Resort group, jut before he was apprehended.

Santa Carolina once had an airstrip - but just like the Santa Carolina hotel, it's a ghost of better days past. In the 1950's Joaquim Alves, a wealthy Portuguese business man, built the Santa Carolina hotel on the island.  The beautiful hotel was the place of many parties, weddings and banquets - until civil war ended it all and the hotel had to be abandoned in 1973.

Santa Carolina became an ''off limits'' place and an unofficial no-go area where nobody lived - until NOW when Survivor SA Santa Carolina left 18 stranded South African celebrities to fight it out on the third season of the reality show.