🇧🇷 Brazil · Southeast
There are few cities in the world where nature and urban life embrace as beautifully as in Rio de Janeiro. The 'Cidade Maravilhosa' unfolds among hills covered in Atlantic forest, pale-sand beaches that run off to the horizon and the huge Guanabara Bay, all crowned by two icons visible from almost anywhere: the Cristo Redentor with its arms open over the Corcovado and the unmistakable Pão de Açúcar. That spectacular landscape —the 'carioca landscape between mountain and sea'— has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2012.
But Rio isn't just a postcard: it's energy, street life and culture. It's Copacabana and Ipanema with their wave-patterned mosaic promenade, their kiosks, their coconut water and their sunset ritual; it's the bohemia of Lapa with its colonial arches and live samba; it's the bondinho rattling down the steep streets of Santa Teresa; it's the burst of colour of the Escadaria Selarón; and it is, of course, Carnival, the most famous popular festival on the planet, with its samba schools parading through the Sambadrome. Cariocas live facing the sea and the music, and that joy is catching.
This guide walks through the essentials of Rio with a practical, warm eye: how to get up to the Cristo and the Pão de Açúcar, which beaches to choose, where to catch the best sunset, how to get around, which neighbourhoods to visit and how to do it with common sense on safety. Rio is a big, intense and sometimes chaotic city, but with a little planning it gives you some of the most unforgettable days of any trip through Brazil.
The city's name comes from a geographical misunderstanding. On 1 January 1502, a Portuguese expedition reached the mouth of a huge bay —the one Indigenous peoples called Guanabara— and, believing it was the mouth of a great river, named it 'Rio de Janeiro' (River of January), because in the Portuguese of the time that kind of sea inlet was also called a 'river' and it was the month of January. Before the Europeans, the region was inhabited by the Tupinambá. In the mid-16th century, the French tried to set up the colony of 'França Antártica' here, allying with the Tamoio people. To drive them out, the Portuguese founded the city of São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro on 1 March 1565, under Estácio de Sá. With the Minas Gerais gold cycle in the 18th century, Rio gained importance as a port and, in 1763, became the capital of colonial Brazil, displacing Salvador. Its most glorious moment came in 1808, when the Portuguese Court, fleeing Napoleon, settled in the city and turned it into the capital of the entire Portuguese Empire. Rio was the capital of independent Brazil and of the Republic until 1960, when that role passed to the brand-new Brasília. In the early 20th century, the great urban reforms of mayor Pereira Passos modernised it 'Paris-style', opening avenues and building gems such as the Theatro Municipal. From its unique mix of peoples came carioca culture: samba, Carnival, bossa nova. The full story is on our history page.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The name Rio de Janeiro comes, curiously, from a geographical mistake. On 1 January 1502, a Portuguese reconnaissance expedition working its way along the coast Pedro Álvares Cabral had just sighted reached the mouth of an enormous bay: the one Indigenous peoples called Guanabara. The navigators, seeing that great opening of water reaching inland, believed it was the mouth of a mighty river. As it was the first day of the month of January —'janeiro' in Portuguese— they named the place 'Rio de Janeiro', the 'River of January'.
There's a linguistic detail that explains the error and makes it less crude than it looks. In the nautical Portuguese of the time, it was common to call not only watercourses but also certain large sea inlets and estuaries a 'river'. So calling a bay a 'river' wasn't so strange for those sailors. What was fixed forever was the name: when, decades later, the city was founded beside that bay, it inherited the place name from that January of 1502.
The bay, on the other hand, kept its Indigenous name: Guanabara, a word of Tupi origin usually translated as 'bosom of the sea' or 'arm of the sea', which reflects how its original inhabitants saw it. And so the geography of Rio keeps in its names the mark of the two worlds that met on its shores: the Portuguese 'Rio de Janeiro' of the city and the Tupi 'Guanabara' of the bay.
Long before there was any city, the shores of Guanabara Bay were inhabited by Tupi-speaking peoples, mainly the Tupinambá (and, in shifting alliances, the Tamoio). They lived from fishing, hunting, gathering and growing cassava, in villages spread along the coast, the islands and the hills of the region. For them, the bay and its surroundings were a rich, well-known territory long before the Europeans arrived.
The first to try to settle permanently weren't the Portuguese but the French. In 1555, an expedition led by Vice-Admiral Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon founded the colony of 'França Antártica' ('France Antarctique') on an island in the bay, a project seeking to establish a French presence —and a refuge for Huguenot Protestants— in the South Atlantic. The French allied with the local Tamoio, who were at odds with the Portuguese, which turned Guanabara Bay into a stage for colonial conflict.
To drive out the French and secure the territory, the Portuguese Crown decided to found a fortified city. The task fell to Estácio de Sá, nephew of the governor general Mem de Sá. On 1 March 1565, Estácio de Sá founded the city of São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro, on an isthmus between the Morro Cara de Cão and the Pão de Açúcar, throwing up a defensive stockade. Years of fighting against the French and the Tamoio followed; in 1567 the Portuguese forces —with the support of the Jesuits Manuel da Nóbrega and José de Anchieta and of allied Indigenous groups— won a decisive victory, though Estácio de Sá died from a wound taken in combat. The city was then moved to the Morro do Castelo, where it put down permanent roots.
Through its first two centuries, Rio de Janeiro was an important but secondary city within colonial Brazil, whose capital was Salvador, in Bahia. The carioca region revolved around its port, the sugar mills nearby and the defence of the entrance to Guanabara Bay, fortified against attacks by rival powers and pirates. Everything changed with an event that reordered the whole colony's economy: the discovery of gold and, later, diamonds in the region of Minas Gerais, in the late 17th century.
The so-called 'gold cycle' drew an enormous number of people into the interior of central-southern Brazil and tipped the colony's economic axis towards that region. And Rio de Janeiro, thanks to its location, became the natural outlet for that wealth: the gold of Minas came down the roads to the carioca port, from where it sailed for Portugal. The city grew, grew rich and gained a strategic importance that Salvador, further from the mines, no longer had.
The political consequence came in 1763: by decision of the Portuguese Crown —in the time of King Dom José I and his powerful minister, the future Marquis of Pombal— the capital of the State of Brazil moved from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro. The decision recognised the new economic reality and also answered military needs, since from Rio it was easier to support Portuguese forces in the disputes with Spain over the south of the continent. From then on, Rio was the political and administrative centre of Portugal's largest colony in the Americas, a role that would set the stage for its most brilliant period.
The event that transformed Rio de Janeiro forever came in 1808. Fleeing Napoleon's troops, who were advancing on Portugal, the entire Portuguese royal family —headed by the prince regent Dom João (the future Dom João VI) and Queen Dona Maria I— crossed the Atlantic with much of the Lisbon nobility and settled in Rio de Janeiro. For the first and only time in history, a European capital moved to one of its colonies: Rio became the seat of the Court and, in effect, the capital of the whole Portuguese Empire.
The Court's arrival produced a rapid metamorphosis. The city, until then a relatively modest colonial capital, filled with institutions that changed its face: the ports were opened to trade with friendly nations (breaking the Portuguese monopoly), and the Banco do Brasil, the Imprensa Régia (the country's first printing press), the Royal Library, the Botanical Garden, schools, academies and theatres were founded. In 1815, the kingdom itself was reorganised and Brazil was raised to the status of United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves, with Rio as capital.
When Dom João VI returned to Portugal in 1821, he left his son Pedro as regent. The following year, in 1822, Pedro proclaimed Brazil's independence and was crowned emperor: Rio de Janeiro then became the capital of the Empire of Brazil. Through the whole 19th century, as imperial capital, the city was the country's political, cultural and economic heart: Dom Pedro I and Dom Pedro II ruled from here, and here the great events of the Empire unfolded, up to the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the proclamation of the Republic in 1889.
With the proclamation of the Republic in 1889, Rio de Janeiro remained the country's capital, now as the Federal District of the Republic of the United States of Brazil. It was a huge, contradictory city: cosmopolitan and elegant in some areas, but also overcrowded, with narrow streets inherited from colonial times and serious public health problems, with yellow fever and smallpox epidemics that damaged its image and its trade.
The great transformation came in the early 20th century. Between 1902 and 1906, mayor Francisco Pereira Passos carried out a radical urban reform, inspired by the Paris remodelled by Baron Haussmann. Pereira Passos demolished whole blocks of the old colonial centre to open great avenues —such as the Avenida Central (today Avenida Rio Branco)—, widen streets, clean up the city and give it monumental eclectic-style buildings. From that era come gems such as the Theatro Municipal, the National Library and the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes. The reform modernised and beautified Rio, but it also carried a high social cost: thousands of poor families were pushed out of the centre, which drove the spread up the hills and the growth of the favelas.
Rio remained the capital of Brazil through almost the whole first half of the 20th century, and was the stage for the country's political and cultural life. The change came in 1960: that year Brasília, the new capital built in the interior to drive development in the centre of the country, was inaugurated, and Rio ceased to be the national capital. The city first became the short-lived state of Guanabara and, in 1975, merged with the old state of Rio de Janeiro, of which it became the capital. Although it lost the rank of national capital, Rio kept its symbolic, cultural and tourist weight as one of the most emblematic cities in the world.
Rio's identity isn't explained only by its political history, but above all by its culture, born of the meeting and mixing of peoples: Indigenous, Portuguese and, decisively, African. The African presence —the fruit of centuries of slavery, since Rio was one of the largest slave ports in the Americas, as the Cais do Valongo, today a World Heritage Site, reminds us— left a deep mark on carioca music, religion, dance and cooking.
Out of that melting pot came samba, the musical genre that became a symbol of Brazil. In the early 20th century, in the working-class neighbourhoods and hills of Rio, communities of African descent shaped modern samba; in 1928 the first samba school was founded (Deixa Falar, forerunner of the great schools) and the carioca Carnival began to turn into the spectacle we know today. The samba school parades —since 1984 at the Sambódromo Marquês de Sapucaí, the work of Oscar Niemeyer— made Rio's Carnival the biggest popular festival in the world. Decades later, in the 1950s and 1960s, the Zona Sul neighbourhoods saw the birth of bossa nova, that sophisticated fusion of samba and jazz immortalised in songs such as 'Garota de Ipanema'.
That cultural richness lives alongside an extraordinary natural landscape, and the combination of the two was finally recognised by the whole of humanity. On 1 July 2012, UNESCO inscribed on its World Heritage list the site 'Rio de Janeiro, carioca landscapes between the mountain and the sea', classified as a 'cultural landscape'. The listing recognises the singular way the city wove itself into its spectacular natural setting —the Corcovado with the Cristo Redentor, the Pão de Açúcar, the Floresta da Tijuca, Guanabara Bay, the beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema— and how that setting inspired forms of urban culture, music and art that made Rio a city unlike any other in the world.