Rio de Janeiro: Santa Teresa & Historic Centre

Then the city grew, expanded, and the fashionable addresses moved elsewhere. Santa Teresa's grand houses were subdivided or simply left to decay. Artists moved in — attracted by cheap rent, beautiful light, and the kind of dilapidated atmosphere that has always appealed to people who make things. By the mid-twentieth century, Santa Teresa had its own identity as Rio's creative quarter, a reputation it has carried ever since.

The Largo do Guimarães itself is the neighbourhood's gathering point — a small square with a few trees, bars with outdoor tables, and the particular slow rhythm of a place that has decided not to rush. On weekend evenings the square fills with music, conversation, and the smell of churrasco from the nearby restaurants. It is the opposite of the Zona Sul beach scene that most visitors associate with Rio. That Rio is beautiful and worth your time. But this one, up here on the hill, is something older and more complicated.

Listen for the sound you will hear periodically during your time in Santa Teresa: the bell of the bonde tram. That bell means your next stop is close.

She died in nineteen forty-six. The house fell into disrepair over the following decades, the roof collapsed, the walls crumbled, the tropical vegetation pushed through the floors. In the nineteen nineties, the city of Rio decided against demolition. Instead they consolidated what remained, stabilised the walls, added walkways and viewing platforms within the ruin itself, and opened it as a cultural centre and exhibition space.

Walk through the open archways. The views from the ruined upper floors are extraordinary — the same view that Laurinda Santos Lobo's guests would have had from her terrace a century ago, with the Centro spreading across the flat land below, the Arcos da Lapa visible from here, and beyond them Guanabara Bay and the mountains of Niterói on the far shore. Rio is one of very few cities in the world where nature and urban density are in genuinely dramatic conversation, and this vantage point is one of the best places to understand that.

The park holds outdoor concerts and film screenings on certain evenings. The structure itself — iron frame exposed, plaster gone, trees growing up through the interior courtyard — is genuinely beautiful in the way that slow-motion collapse sometimes is. It is one of the honest places in Rio: a city that does not always bother to hide what time does.

The bonde — the word comes from the English word 'bond,' referring to the financial bonds used to raise money for the original construction — runs on a combination of electric motors and cable-assisted sections on the steeper gradients. The bell that you have been hearing through Santa Teresa is the conductor's signal, rung to clear pedestrians from the narrow streets. Locals step aside without looking up. They have been doing this all their lives.

A tragic accident in two thousand and eleven damaged a section of the viaduct and killed several passengers. The tram service was suspended for years during repairs and a comprehensive safety review. It returned to partial service in two thousand and fifteen, restored and running again on its historic route across the top of the Lapa arches. The accident made the city take the system seriously in a way that decades of ordinary maintenance had not achieved.

The Museu do Bonde holds old rolling stock, photographs, maps, and the mechanical equipment of the original system. It is small and unpretentious — a working museum in a working depot. The real exhibit is outside: the yellow tram on the tracks, the bell, the narrow streets of Santa Teresa through which it moves at a walking pace, and the passengers who hang off the open sides with practised ease.

The Portuguese brought considerable engineering ambition to their colonial capital. By seventeen fifty, Rio de Janeiro had been the capital of Portuguese America since seventeen sixty-three — it would formally become the seat of the Estado do Brasil — and investment in infrastructure reflected the city's growing importance in the Atlantic trade network. Sugar from the northeast, gold and diamonds from the interior of Minas Gerais, slaves from West Africa: all of this commerce passed through Rio, and the wealth it generated built the colonial city whose bones you are walking through.

The aqueduct was decommissioned as a water supply in the late nineteenth century when modern waterworks replaced it. In nineteen sixty it was converted to carry the tram line, giving the structure a new purpose without altering its form. Stand back and look at it from across the street: the proportions are classical, the stone has the colour of old honey in the afternoon light, and the yellow tram crossing the top tier is one of the genuine visual gifts of Rio de Janeiro. No amount of familiarity with the photograph prepares you for standing underneath it.

Lapa's association with nightlife, music, and a certain kind of urban dissidence goes back much further. In the early twentieth century, this was the neighbourhood where Rio's working class came to drink, dance, and hear music that the polite society of the city did not officially approve of. The samba schools that parade through the Sambadrome each Carnival have their roots in the hills and neighbourhoods around Lapa. Samba emerged from the Afro-Brazilian communities of Rio's periphery and its central neighbourhoods — a synthesis of African rhythmic traditions, the lundum and maxixe dances, and the musical culture of the terreiros, the Candomblé religious houses.

On a Friday or Saturday night, the streets here fill from around ten o'clock and do not empty until dawn. The rhythms you hear from the bars are live — forró bands, pagode groups, choro ensembles, and samba percussion circles that form spontaneously on the cobblestones. The smell of feijoada — black beans slow-cooked with smoked pork and sausage, Rio's defining dish — drifts from the restaurants alongside the smoke of street barbecues. Even in the quiet of the afternoon, the neighbourhood holds the memory of all those nights in the air around it.

The original cathedral of Rio de Janeiro stood on a different site in the Centro. The decision to build an entirely new structure in the nineteen sixties was partly practical — the old building was inadequate for the growing city — and partly a statement about Brazil's modernist ambitions. The same years that produced this cathedral produced Brasília, the new purpose-built national capital designed by Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa, inaugurated in nineteen sixty. Brazil in the nineteen sixties was making very deliberate architectural arguments about national identity and modernity.

Enter if you have a few minutes. The stained glass alone is worth the detour. The scale of the space — and the silence inside it, which absorbs the city noise completely — is a particular kind of gift.

The square takes its name, Cinelândia, from the movie theatres that lined it through the mid-twentieth century. By the nineteen thirties and forties, the neighbourhood had become Rio's entertainment district, the place where the middle class came to see films, hear concerts, and drink in the bars around the praça. The cinemas are mostly gone now — the multiplex era and the economic pressures of the late twentieth century closed them one by one — but the name has stayed.

The Museu Nacional de Belas Artes and the Biblioteca Nacional flank the square on the same axis. They were built in the same period and the same style. Standing in the praça and turning slowly, you can take in a complete picture of what early twentieth-century Brazil wanted its capital to look like: European in form, Brazilian in material, and confident of its place among the serious cities of the world.

The fleet arrived in Rio de Janeiro in March eighteen oh eight. Dom João made Rio de Janeiro the capital of the Portuguese Empire — the only time in history that a European colonial power governed its empire from the colonies. He opened the royal ports to international trade, established the first printing press in Brazil, founded the Bank of Brazil, and began transforming Rio from a colonial port into an imperial capital. The Royal Library was opened to selected readers almost immediately.

Brazil declared independence from Portugal in eighteen twenty-two, under Dom João's son Dom Pedro I. The political break was relatively peaceful — compared to the violent independence struggles elsewhere in Latin America — partly because the entire administrative infrastructure of the state was already here, and partly because Dom Pedro himself declared independence and became Brazil's first emperor. The library stayed. It has been growing ever since.

The building you see today was completed in nineteen ten, in the same Beaux-Arts style as the Teatro Municipal across the square. The reading rooms inside are worth seeing for their architectural quality alone — high ceilings, ornamental ironwork, the particular atmosphere of a grand nineteenth-century library that has never entirely been modernised.

The port zone is also the area of Rio most deeply associated with the African diaspora in Brazil. The Valongo Wharf — a few blocks north of where you are standing — was the largest port of disembarkation for enslaved Africans in the history of the world. Between approximately seventeen seventy and eighteen thirty-one, an estimated nine hundred thousand enslaved people arrived through Valongo, more than through any other port in the Atlantic slave trade. The wharf was buried and forgotten for nearly two centuries. It was excavated during the Porto Maravilha construction works and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

MAR's permanent collection focuses on the visual culture of Rio de Janeiro and Brazil from the colonial period to the present. The temporary exhibitions use the building's extraordinary views — from the top floor you can see the bay, the Sugar Loaf, and the mountains encircling the city — as part of the experience. This is Rio's gift to itself: a museum whose best exhibit is the view from its windows.

Dom João returned to Portugal in eighteen twenty-one, under political pressure from a constitutional revolution in Lisbon. He left his son Dom Pedro behind as regent of Brazil. In September eighteen twenty-two, Dom Pedro was travelling near São Paulo when he received letters from Lisbon demanding he return to Portugal immediately and dissolve the measures that had made Brazil increasingly autonomous. He refused. On the seventh of September, on the banks of the Ipiranga River, he reportedly drew his sword and declared: 'Independence or death.' Brazil was a separate nation from that moment.

Dom Pedro I became Brazil's first Emperor, reigning until eighteen thirty-one. His son, Dom Pedro II, reigned from eighteen forty-one until the military proclamation of the republic in eighteen eighty-nine — nearly fifty years on the throne, making him one of the longest-reigning monarchs in the history of the Americas. The Paço Imperial was his official residence in Rio.

Stand in the praça and look at the water. Guanabara Bay stretches before you, its surface catching the light, the hills of Niterói visible across the far shore. To your left the port buildings and the MAR you just visited. To your right the colonial facades of the old Centro. Behind you the Paço Imperial and the history it has absorbed. You have walked from the bohemian hill of Santa Teresa, across the Lapa arches, through the civic grandeur of Cinelândia, to the water's edge where Rio's history began. The city is too big, too contradictory, and too alive to be summarised in any walk — but this is where it started, and it is a good place to stop.