Rio de Janeiro travel guide

Top 10 sights in Rio de Janeiro

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

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   1© Arne Müseler · CC BY-SA 3.0 de

   Christ the Redeemer

   Thirty metres of reinforced concrete faced in soapstone tiles, finished in 1931 on the summit of Corcovado and paid for largely by public subscription. Lightning strikes it several times a year and chips off fingers, which are replaced from a stock of matching stone.

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2. 

   2© Gustavo Facci from Argentina · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Copacabana

   Four kilometres of beach in the South Zone, backed by a promenade whose black and white wave pattern Roberto Burle Marx laid out in 1970. Two million people gather on the sand for New Year's Eve, dressed in white.

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   Ipanema District

   The beach and quarter west of Copacabana, whose name entered the world through a song written in 1962 in a bar two streets back. Rio still navigates it by the numbered lifeguard posts, each with its own crowd and politics.

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4. 

   4© Marcelomania · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Museu Nacional

   Brazil's oldest scientific institution, founded in 1818 in what became the imperial palace. A fire in September 2018 destroyed something like eighty-five per cent of twenty million items, including most of the Indigenous language recordings; Luzia, an eleven-thousand-year-old skull, was recovered in fragments.

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5. 

   5© Halley Pacheco de Oliveira · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Botafogo

   A beachfront quarter on a curved bay with the Sugarloaf standing at the mouth of it, which makes the view from its pavement the most reproduced in Rio after Corcovado. The yacht club and the cable car station are at the far end.

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6. 

   6© Chensiyuan · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Leblon

   The quarter west of Ipanema across a canal, and the most expensive land in Rio by the square metre. Its beach is calmer, its restaurants are where the city's professional class eats, and the favela of Vidigal rises directly behind it.

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7. 

   7© Halley Pacheco de Oliveira · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Valongo Wharf

   A stone wharf of 1811 where enslaved Africans were landed and sold until 1831 — somewhere between half a million and a million people came ashore on these steps. It was buried under asphalt for a century, found in 2011 during roadworks, and made World Heritage in 2017.

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8. 

   8© Halley Pacheco de Oliveira · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Tijuca National Park

   An urban national park of some forty square kilometres in the mountains inside the city. The forest is second growth: coffee planting had stripped the hills and threatened the capital's water, so from 1861 the state replanted it by hand, tree by tree.

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   9© Haakon S. Krohn · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Rio de Janeiro Cathedral

   A cone of reinforced concrete finished in 1976, seventy-five metres high and holding twenty thousand standing, with four strips of stained glass running from floor to roof. Its shape is drawn from Maya pyramids and it looks like nothing else in Latin America.

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10. 

    10© paulsmithrj · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Barra da Tijuca

    A quarter of high-rise condominiums along eighteen kilometres of open Atlantic beach in the west of the city, developed from the 1970s on an American suburban model. The 2016 Olympic park was built here, and much of it has stood empty since.

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Popular tickets & tours in Rio de Janeiro

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1. 

   1© chensiyuan · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Rocinha

   The largest favela in Brazil, on a steep hillside between two of the wealthiest districts in Rio, with somewhere between seventy and a hundred and fifty thousand residents depending on who counts. Oscar Niemeyer designed the footbridge that crosses the motorway at its foot.

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   America Football Club

   A football club founded in 1904 in the Tijuca district, one of the four traditional Rio clubs, and now well below the others in the league. Its ground and its supporters are a reminder that Rio football is older than its stadiums.

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   Cidade de Deus

   A housing project built in the 1960s in the west of the city to rehouse people cleared out of favelas nearer the beaches. Paulo Lins's novel and the 2002 film took its name and its story, and the neighbourhood has been dealing with that portrayal ever since.

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   4© Arne Müseler · CC BY-SA 3.0 de

   Museum of Tomorrow

   Santiago Calatrava's science museum of 2015 on the Mauá pier, built as part of the port regeneration, whose subject is the next fifty years rather than the past. It draws bay water for cooling and carries solar fins that track the sun.

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5. 

   5© ri5co · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Gávea District

   A wealthy residential quarter inland from Leblon, holding the Catholic university and the city's racecourse, and known as the district where Rio's artists and academics live. The Botanical Garden and the forest are both on its edges.

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   Old Cathedral of Rio de Janeiro

   Former cathedral of Rio de Janeiro, built from 1761 as a Carmelite church. Brazil's emperors were crowned here, and the interior is covered in gilded carving.

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   7© Alicia Nijdam from Cordoba, Argentina · CC BY 2.0

   Flamengo District

   District of Rio de Janeiro along the bay, with the Aterro do Flamengo park laid out in 1965 on landfill by Roberto Burle Marx. The football club was founded here in 1895.

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   8© Gabriel Heusi/Brasil2016.gov.br · CC BY 3.0 br

   Fort Copacabana

   A coastal fort of 1914 at the southern end of Copacabana beach, still an army property but open to visitors, with the army museum inside. Eighteen officers walked out of it in 1922 to march against the government; two survived, and Brazilians know them as the Eighteen of the Fort.

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   9© Vianna Rafael · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Olaria Atlético Clube

   A football club founded in 1915 in the Olaria district of the North Zone, playing in yellow, blue and red. It has spent most of its history in the Rio state championship rather than the national leagues, which is the ordinary condition of Brazilian football.

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    Maracanã District

    A middle-class quarter in the North Zone whose name is Tupi-Guarani for green bird, and which holds the Maracanã stadium. The 1950 World Cup final was played there in front of something close to two hundred thousand people — the largest crowd ever at a football match.

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