Rio de Janeiro

• 1. Introduction

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  Rio de Janeiro sits at the entrance to Guanabara Bay, where the shoreline bends east to west near the Tropic of Capricorn, and the city faces largely south toward the open Atlantic. That unusual geography gave it a name built on a mistake: when Portuguese sailors entered the bay on the 1st of January 1502, they mistook the broad inlet for the mouth of a river, calling it the January River. The name stuck, and the city that grew around it would go on to serve as the capital of an empire, a monarchy, a republic, and a kingdom spread across two continents.

  Rio is today the second-most-populous city in Brazil, with roughly 6 million residents within city limits and between 11 and 13.5 million in the wider metropolitan area. Yet its residents, known as cariocas, live in one of the most unequal cities in the Western Hemisphere, where gleaming beaches and towering favelas occupy the same hillsides. How a Portuguese colonial outpost founded on the 1st of March 1565 became all of this, all at once, is a story worth following carefully.

• 2. From Bay to Capital

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  Gaspar de Lemos, captain of a ship in Pedro Álvares Cabral's fleet, led the expedition that first recorded Guanabara Bay on that January morning in 1502. But the Portuguese did not settle there immediately. The first European foothold came in 1555, when the French admiral Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon occupied an island in the bay with 500 colonists and built Fort Coligny, intending to establish France Antarctique.

  The Portuguese response was measured and then decisive. Governor General Mem de Sá launched a military campaign, and his nephew Estácio de Sá delivered the final blow. On the 20th of January 1567, French forces were expelled for good. Just two years earlier, on the 1st of March 1565, Estácio de Sá had formally founded the city, naming it São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro in honor of Saint Sebastian, the patron saint of Portugal's reigning monarch.

  For nearly two centuries after that founding, the city was a useful but secondary port. What changed everything was gold. In the late 17th century, Bandeirantes discovered gold and diamonds in the neighboring captaincy of Minas Gerais. Rio's deep harbor made it a far more practical export point than Salvador, far to the northeast, and on the 27th of January 1763, the colonial administration shifted its seat from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro.

• 3. A Kingdom in the Tropics

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  Napoleon's invasion of Portugal in 1808 set in motion something with almost no precedent in history. The Portuguese royal family, Queen Maria I, and most of Lisbon's nobility fled across the Atlantic and relocated the court to Rio de Janeiro. The city became, in effect, the capital of a European monarchy operating from one of its own colonies. Historians count this as one of the few times in history that the capital of a colonizing country officially shifted to a city in one of its colonies.

  The royal arrival reshaped Rio almost overnight. Hundreds of noblemen needed housing; many ordinary residents were simply evicted from their homes to accommodate the court. Within the first decade, however, the city also gained lasting institutions. The Military Academy, the Royal School of Sciences, Arts and Crafts, the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, and the National Library of Brazil, which holds the largest collection in Latin America, all date to this period. The first printed newspaper in Brazil, the Gazeta do Rio de Janeiro, began circulation here.

  When Brazil was elevated to a kingdom in 1815, Rio became the capital of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarves. The royal family returned to Lisbon in 1821, but Prince Pedro remained, and in 1822 he proclaimed Brazilian independence, keeping Rio as the seat of his new empire. The city would hold that role until 1889, when the monarchy fell and the republic began, and then continued as capital for another seven decades, until Brasília was inaugurated on the 21st of April 1960.

• 4. Slavery and the Port

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  For the entire colonial period and well into the independent era, Rio de Janeiro was a city built on enslaved labor. In 1819, there were 145,000 enslaved people in the captaincy. By 1840, that number had climbed to 220,000.

  Between 1811 and 1831 alone, between 500,000 and a million enslaved people arrived in Rio through Valongo Wharf, a landing point now recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Port of Rio de Janeiro was, by that measure, the largest slave port in the Americas. The black community that formed during and after slavery descended primarily from people trafficked from Angola and Mozambique, and Rio's demographic and cultural identity cannot be understood without reckoning with that history.

  The 2022 census found that 38.7 percent of the city's population identified as mixed race and 15.6 percent as Black. A 2009 genetic ancestry study conducted in a Rio suburb found that the actual European genetic contribution among those who self-identified as mixed was, on average, around 80 percent, far higher than participants expected, reflecting the complexity of how race is understood and self-reported in Brazil.

• 5. Reform, Revolt, and the Favela

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  By the time Brazil's republic was established in 1889, Rio was a city without functioning sanitation, overrun by yellow fever, dysentery, tuberculosis, and even outbreaks of plague. The mayor named in 1902, Pereira Passos, imposed sweeping urban reforms modeled on Paris. He demolished the cortiços, the cramped tenement dwellings where the poor were concentrated, and built the Municipal Theater, the National Museum of Fine Arts, and the National Library, while also bringing electric power to the city.

  The people displaced by Passos had nowhere to go but uphill. They moved to the city's hills and created the first favelas. Today, more than 1.3 million people live in Rio's 813 favelas, 21 percent of the city's total population. The favela was not merely a housing crisis; it was a consequence of government policy.

  The reform era also produced popular resistance. Oswaldo Cruz, appointed Director General of Public Health by Passos, implemented compulsory vaccination and authorized forced entry into homes to kill mosquitoes and rats. The population rose up in what became known as the Vaccine Revolt. Two years later, in 1910, Afro-Brazilian sailors in the Brazilian Navy mutinied in what is called the Revolt of the Lash, protesting the use of corporal punishment that mirrored the treatment of enslaved people. The mutineers seized control of the battleship Minas Geraes and threatened to shell the city.

• 6. Economy and Industry

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  Off-shore oil exploration in the Campos Basin began in 1968 and transformed Rio's economic character. The city became the natural base for Brazil's energy sector, hosting the headquarters of Petrobras and Vale, two of the country's largest corporations, alongside the Latin American headquarters of international oil companies including Shell and Esso.

  Rio holds the second-largest municipal GDP in Brazil and, as of 2008, ranked 30th in the world, estimated at roughly 343 billion reais. Services account for 65.5 percent of that output, followed by commerce at 23.4 percent. The city is also the second-largest center of research and development in Brazil, accounting for 17 percent of national scientific output according to 2005 data. The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro is the second-best university in Brazil according to QS World University Rankings and ranks among the top five in Latin America.

  Rio's Stock Exchange, the BVRJ, was the first stock exchange founded in Brazil, in 1845. By 2011, the cost of living had risen to the point where Mercer's rankings placed Rio 12th among the most expensive cities in the world for expatriate employees, with five-star hotel rates that were, at the time, the second most expensive on earth, behind only New York.

• 7. Landmarks and Sports

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  The statue of Christ the Redeemer atop Corcovado mountain has been named one of the New Seven Wonders of the World. Sugarloaf Mountain, the rocky outcrop at the entrance to Guanabara Bay, is served by a cable car. The Sambódromo, a permanent grandstand-lined parade avenue designed specifically for Carnival, handles the samba schools that practice year-round in the North Zone neighborhoods of Mangueira, Salgueiro, Império Serrano, Unidos da Tijuca, and Imperatriz Leopoldinense.

  Maracanã Stadium once held nearly 199,854 people for the 1950 World Cup final, making it the highest-capacity football venue in the world at the time. It hosted the finals of both the 1950 and 2014 FIFA World Cups, and the 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup. On the 2nd of October 2009, the International Olympic Committee announced that Rio would host the 2016 Summer Olympics, defeating Chicago, Tokyo, and Madrid. The games made Rio the first South American and first Portuguese-speaking city to hold the Olympics, and the city also hosted the XV Pan American Games in 2007.

  The first football match ever played in Brazil took place in Rio in September 1894, beside the Bangu Textile Factory, when Thomas Donohoe, a British worker from Busby, Scotland, organized a five-a-side game among British workers after writing to his wife Elizabeth to bring a football from home. That match came six months before the more widely credited first game organized by Charles Miller in São Paulo.

• 8. Environment and the Future

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  Guanabara Bay, whose name the city once bore and which defines its shape, now carries the weight of decades of neglect. The bay has lost mangrove areas and receives untreated domestic and industrial sewage, oils, and heavy metals. The levels of particulate matter in Rio's air run twice as high as the limit recommended by the World Health Organization, driven largely by vehicle traffic.

  The Tijuca National Park, which became a national park in 1961, is the largest city-surrounded urban forest in the world and a UNESCO Environmental Heritage and Biosphere Reserve. The Floresta da Pedra Branca in the West Zone is the single largest urban forest in the world. The city also holds the Passeio Público, recognized as the first public park in the Americas.

  Since the early 2010s, Rio has been inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its arts, urban culture, and landscapes set within a natural environment. The G20 summit met in the city in 2024, and Rio is scheduled to host the FIFA Women's World Cup in 2027, adding to a record of major events that few cities anywhere have matched. The Santa Teresa Tram, the oldest operating electric tramway in Latin America, resumed its full pre-2011 length of 6 kilometers in January 2019, and its Paula Mattos branch reopened in January 2025, a small but durable thread connecting Rio's past to its ongoing life.