Ruins in the contemporary urban fabric can be considered to be a ‘difficult memory’, as Paul Ricouer named it in Memory, History, Forgetting. They are hard to recall and difficult to grasp and to confer new meanings and significances for the present uses. Different from the classical cult to ruins that spread from the first excavations in the XVI century to the Romantic XIX century ruins visited in the Grand Tours, our contemporary ruins are produced by the fall of the industrial civilization and considered to be hindrances to the urban development. Nowadays, in a country of relative recent urbanization such as Brazil, the vestiges of industrial plants, mills, railways and warehouses constitute a new urban language that, between requalification, heritage and destruction, bring new challenges for urban planning. When preserving only a small parcel of large industrial complexes, in order to allude to some piece of memory - chimneys standing for factories - the space dimension is overlooked: these samples preserved act mostly as symbolic remains, preventing new generations from understanding the industrial activity in itself. On the other hand, requalifications generally edulcorate the industrial activity, transforming spaces meant for work in ‘cultural’ or ‘leisure’ sites. Few and innocuous preservation initiatives based only on tourism imperatives, the destruction of factories built in modern architecture style, not yet considered endangered or ‘old enough’ to be preserved and a general lack of public consciousness and of clear state policies all thrive in a country facing major problems concerning poverty, mass migration and urban violence. What is the reality of industrial heritage preservation today in Brazil? My aim is to present and debate recent cases of industrial heritage in Brazil (specifically in the state of São Paulo), with the aid of a photo essay – in order to analyze the difficult relationship between suppression and interest, conservation and reconceptualization based on concrete examples of contemporary urban Brazil.