The saying goes that sometimes you have to take a step back to take two steps forward. Arthemus Pugliesi was called “crazy” because, despite holding a position of responsibility at one of the most important Brazilian construction companies at the time, he decided to make the leap to ACCIONA when it was still a company just beginning to operate in his country. The reasons behind this decision, made with both heart and a lot of thought, are explained in this in-depth interview with someone now making history at ACCIONA in Brazil.
Arthemus speaks to us from his office in São Paulo, against the backdrop of a whiteboard filled with multicolored post-its and calendar dates. Judging by his calm tone and relaxed smile, you wouldn’t guess that he is one of the construction managers of Line 6 – Orange in São Paulo, the largest subway project in Latin America and one of ACCIONA’s most ambitious infrastructure projects. He oversees one of the sections of the stations that make up the project and has kindly agreed to spend a few minutes with us to chat about his work, who he is, and how he manages to keep calm in the midst of the storm.
I spy… an engineer
Perhaps due to his habit of applying efficiency criteria, our interviewee quickly delved into his childhood in Minas Gerais, his studies at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora-MG, and his first job, all within the first five minutes of our conversation. So we had him rewind a bit. Why is his last name Pugliesi? And why did his family move from São Paulo to a place as small as Minas Gerais in the 1980s? “My great-grandfather was Italian and emigrated to Brazil in 1912,” he explains, clarifying his last name.
“My parents gave me a very open, very honest upbringing; they taught me not to judge others too much, to get to know them first.”
As for Minas Gerais, a Brazilian state famous for its gold, silver, and iron mines, his parents moved there in search of tranquility. “You could walk around the city; you could do things that maybe today aren’t possible for a child.” His parents were quite bohemian, “not quite hippies, but almost.” His name also has an explanation: they named him Arthemus because his father was a great admirer of Greek culture. “My upbringing was very open, very sincere; they taught me not to judge others too much, to get to know them first.”
Young Arthemus often traveled from Minas Gerais to São Paulo to visit the rest of his family. From the car window, he would take in the world with a child’s curiosity: “I loved the roads… My father would count the cities we passed through… I knew the whole route, where the stops were, where to eat well… I loved being in the car, looking at the landscape.” Did they play something similar to the “I spy” game? “Yes, we would ask what you were thinking or what you were seeing, and you would say: a mountain, a hill, a star, and things like that,” he confirms. This early fascination with human landscapes, buildings, and roads was, in Arthemus’ words, one of the first signs of his calling as a civil engineer.
And that was the career he pursued. He mentions that his parents didn’t have “a lot of money,” and that he spent his first year studying at a private university before managing to enter the Federal University of Juiz de Fora-MG. He paints a realistic picture of that transition: “There I faced a very harsh reality; it was very difficult, very demanding. Even though I was good at studying, I struggled in the first year. I had to dedicate many hours to it. In the end, I only studied and played sports as a release.”
Thus, he kept his passion for team sports like basketball, which he would have pursued professionally if he weren’t 6 feet tall—“which is tall, but a bit short for competing at the professional level.” Besides representing the university in competitions, he also showcased his leadership skills in those games: “I was always the captain of the team. I was someone who brought people together; that was innate to me.”
Favorable winds in the maritime sector
Arthemus kicked off the 21st century working for a maritime port construction company in Rio de Janeiro, a role he saw as a golden learning opportunity: “I didn’t know anything about it; it was a coincidence, but I loved it because I learned new things, and it was an engineering sector I knew little about.” He didn’t realize it at the time, but this experience would be the springboard for his entry into ACCIONA a few years later. The transition was smoother than his difficult first year at university: “There was a significant gap in Brazil in that sector. Anyone with the will, ability, and a bit of management could quickly carve out a niche.”
He recalls working in various parts of the country, carrying out “small projects, but of great importance for the region’s development.” Finally, after five years, he returned to Rio de Janeiro to undertake a major environmental project: a project to decontaminate an arm of the sea known as the Canal da Fondão in Guanabara Bay, which had high levels of pollution. “We had to increase the channel’s draft by dredging, which was my specialty.”
“To this day, what motivates me the most is the impact of my projects, seeing how they change people’s lives. It’s something that excites me and pushes me to keep going.”
There his company worked as a subcontractor for one of the heavyweights in the sector. After six months, he was offered a position at the new company. Paradoxically, he became the head of the previous subcontractor. This stage, which he considers the high point of his career up to that point, also led him to build the iconic Ponte do Saber (Bridge of Knowledge).
What motivated him about those projects? “To this day, what motivates me most is the impact of my projects, seeing how they change people’s lives. It’s something that excites me and drives me to keep going.” He talks about the concrete impact of those early works: “For example, the people who lived near that polluted canal were a very low-income population.”
At that time, Arthemus already had a team of about a hundred people under his command. “Quirós Galvao was one of the three most important companies in Brazil, and I was starting a promising career in a large Brazilian company. It was every engineer’s dream,” he recalls. However, a surprising phone call was about to change his plans.
A job interview at a hotel with a company without an office
Sometimes, when we look back, we see the pivotal moments of our lives etched with extraordinary clarity. It’s as if the camera in our mind has a special lens that magnifies every detail. Arthemus recalls the call he received nearly fifteen years ago with that same precision: “Her name was Katia Forti; I remember her name. She said, ‘I’m from ACCIONA, a Spanish company landing in Brazil, and we have some port works planned for the north of Rio de Janeiro. We would like to contact you.’” The young engineer scratched his head. “ACCIONA?” A decade later, things would change significantly, but at that time ACCIONA was a company with hardly any presence in Brazil and therefore no brand recognition.
Driven by curiosity, he researched online and found that it was a “gigantic multinational” with projects worldwide. So he decided to give it a shot to better understand the kind of project they were proposing. “They invited me to an interview in Rio de Janeiro, but they didn’t have an office yet, so the interviews were held in a hotel.” That peculiarity did not deter him, so he met with Domingo Gonzalez, “our future director of the entire project.” What was the challenge?
“Without knowing ACCIONA, when I saw the technology they worked with, as well as the human team, I decided to leave one of the largest companies in Brazil to work with them.”
“It was a magnificent project with new technology I had never seen before: the Kugira caissons,” he says, referring to the floating caisson dock capable of seating concrete blocks up to sixty-seven meters long on the seabed. “Blocks that are like buildings,” our interviewee explains. “It’s a technology that allows us to work much more quickly and with less environmental impact because it affects the seabed much less. Although each caisson requires tremendous logistics.”
And his imagination took flight: “When I thought about the construction process and the technology it involved, I was deeply fascinated. Without knowing much about ACCIONA, without having an office, but with Domingo’s figure, who later became a professional mentor, I decided to leave what was one of the largest companies in Brazil.”
Here he encountered the skepticism we mentioned earlier: “Many of my acquaintances asked if I was sure about this ‘madness.’ They even brought me to the general manager of the company to convince me otherwise, and normally, he was an unapproachable person. But I was determined and convinced.” So, on July 15, 2011, he started working with ACCIONA.
He himself gives the dimension of this leap into the unknown: “I started working in a small office in the north of Rio de Janeiro. I was the second Brazilian person hired by ACCIONA in that project. I can say that we started from scratch, although with all the support of a multinational.” The project he refers to is Terminal 2 of the port of Açu, to which he devoted all his energy as Production Manager for the next five years. “Over time I also became aware of ACCIONA’s vision, mission and purpose of sustainable development,” he reflects.
“Over time I also became more aware of ACCIONA’s vision, mission and purpose of sustainable development.”
Arthemus also highlights the logistical scale of the project itself: initially manufacturing and transporting six caissons from another city and then manufacturing another thirty-six caissons in the port of Açu, where they had to be fixed in the middle of bodies of water at the expense of bad weather and waves. “Even if you had all the technology, there were unpredictable moments that were out of your control, with great risks of the caissons being damaged.” In the end, thanks to the professionalism of the team, everything went smoothly.
“It was a very big responsibility. I managed to get it done in a short time and successfully, and I was able to gain the trust of my bosses. That was very important to me.” Those results cleared up any uncertainties: “Obviously, I had some doubts at the beginning that I had made the right decision, but those first few months gave me the confidence. This idea was reinforced every day.”
The surnames of a good firefighter
We ask him about the moment when the inaugural red ribbon was cut for the project, but Arthemus surprises us with a new twist: “Things were going well, on track, as they say, when I was called for another project. There was still a year to go before the Açu port was finished.” It was an ambitious ring road in São Paulo. In a way, he was returning to the road where he started dreaming about civil engineering aboard a car with his parents. “Yes, one of those roads actually reached the ring road… I hadn’t thought of that,” he says with a smile, as if realizing that little twist of fate.
He tells us that that project was on a tight deadline when he was called in to take the reins. Did they count on him as a firefighter for an emergency? He laughs again. “Fair enough. I remember my boss saying to me: such a long name must belong to our biggest firefighter.” And he proceeds to stretch his last names like an accordion: actually, his name is not Arthemus Pugliesi, but Arthemus Augustus Wagner Silveira de Toledo Piza Santos Pugliesi. We ask him to put it in writing, just in case.
“One of the things I like about ACCIONA is that it has given me the opportunity to work in a variety of areas with each project.”
So Arthemus went from working on a port to a road. That was quite a radical change from his previous projects, wasn’t it? “Absolutely. One of the things I can say about ACCIONA is that it gives me the opportunity to diversify in my fields.”
How many major infrastructure projects can a civil engineer undertake? If you think coldly, and bearing in mind that these are works that can last for five or six years, it’s easy to see why Arthemus describes each one as a distinct life stage or, more aptly, as one of his children. And all parents say they love their children equally, but a few years later a particularly beloved one was to arrive. “It’s the project of my life so far,” he sums up.
Orange Line 6
After the ring road project and returning to the port world with the natural gas infrastructure of the port of Açu, which in a way was an extension of the Kugira caisson dock he built years ago, came his greatest challenge. We are talking about São Paulo’s Orange Line 6, where he is the Section Manager. “There are fifteen stations and fifteen kilometers of subway tracks. Specifically, I am responsible for five stations and a depot yard,” he explains.
Here he returns to leadership, which he describes as “putting people first”. He adds: “One of my skills is understanding the right profiles for each type of work”. The importance of human teams, beyond great technical prowess, is evident in the diversity and inclusion policies that have been adopted. Thus, women make up 70 % of the staff in the segment factory that supports the line’s tunnels.
The logo of a Top Employer
Many things have changed since that risky bet that began with a phone call years ago. Today Arthemus speaks with pride of the projects undertaken in that time, seeing how members of his teams have made the leap to other parts of the world. “My teams are not mine, I’m happy when they can have opportunities in other areas,” he says.
“Hoy, a diferencia de cuando entré, ACCIONA es una empresa reconocida en Brasil. Cuando voy por la calle, la gente sabe [por el logo de su camisa] que trabajo en el metro y que es una de las mayores empresas del país. De hecho, acabamos de recibir el reconocimiento de Top Employer 2024 en el país”
In this regard, he also reflects on the potential of Brazilian engineers, who account for almost half of the participants in ACCIONA’s iXPA initiative to train the leaders of the future in new skills. Many of them have grown up, in turn, under the leadership of Arthemus.
It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but a piece of clothing with a logo on it can also symbolize many things. “Today, unlike when I joined, ACCIONA is a well-known company in this country,” he explains. Then, he tugs at the logo on his corporate polo shirt to show it to the camera and concludes, “When I walk down the street in São Paulo wearing this, people know I work for the metro and that it’s one of the biggest companies in Brazil. In fact, we’ve just been recognized as a Top Employer 2024 in the country.”
In short, Arthemus’s story is one of growth: the growth of ACCIONA in Brazil since he joined the company, his own personal and professional growth in facing various challenges, and the growth of the people who have worked alongside him since that life-changing phone call.
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