Famous Landmarks in Rio de Janeiro
A granite peak, a colonial church and a Beaux-Arts theatre map four centuries of building.
Rio's landmarks sit at three different heights and belong to three different centuries. Down in the old commercial core, a colonial-era parish church shows how long building could stretch here: a Portuguese Baroque façade begun in 1775, carrying Neoclassical and Neo-Renaissance decoration added inside well into the following century. A few streets away, an opera house finished in 1909 belongs to the eclectic, European-modelled rebuilding of the same district, its exterior carved with the names of admired artists. Above both, reinforced concrete and soapstone define the twentieth century: a colossal Art Deco statue of Jesus, built between 1922 and 1931 on a 700-metre granite summit, is visible from most of the city spread below it. Colonial masonry, belle-époque stone and modern concrete sit within a few kilometres of one another.
Christ the Redeemer
1922–1931 · Paul Landowski
The pale, soapstone-clad figure spreads its arms 28 metres wide, nearly as wide as its 30-metre height, and crowns a bare granite summit that rises straight out of the forest, visible from almost anywhere in the city below.
The statue was designed by French-Polish sculptor Paul Landowski and realised by Brazilian engineer Heitor da Silva Costa with French engineer Albert Caquot; Romanian sculptor Gheorghe Leonida modelled the face. The organisers' first plan showed Christ holding a globe in one hand and a cross in the other before it was changed to the current arms-spread design. Built of reinforced concrete faced in soapstone, it stands on the 700-metre summit of Corcovado inside Tijuca National Park and was later voted one of the New 7 Wonders of the World.
- The original design had Christ holding a globe in one hand and a cross in the other before organisers switched to the outstretched arms seen today.
- It weighs 635 metric tons and is the largest Art Deco sculpture in the world.
Photo: Arturdiasr (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Municipal Theatre of Rio de Janeiro
1909
Modelled closely on a famous Parisian opera house, its cream stone façade, mansard roofline and colonnaded front overlook an open square in the old centre, with the carved names of European and Brazilian artists running along the outer walls.
The theatre is an opera house in Rio's Centro district, near the National Library and the National Fine Arts Museum, overlooking the open Cinelândia square. Completed in 1909, it is built in an eclectic style inspired by Charles Garnier's Paris Opéra, and its outer walls carry the carved names of classic European and Brazilian artists. It holds heritage protection as an INEPAC Good Class monument and is counted among the country's most important theatres.
Photo: Elvis Boaventura (CC BY 3.0)
Candelaria Church
1775–late 19th century
A Portuguese colonial Baroque exterior, built as a single freestanding block in the old commercial centre, encloses an interior whose Neoclassical and Neo-Renaissance decoration was added generations after the façade itself.
Candelária is a Roman Catholic parish church in the old commercial centre of Rio de Janeiro. It was built and decorated over a long stretch of time, from 1775 into the late nineteenth century, which is why its Portuguese colonial Baroque exterior encloses later Neoclassical and Neo-Renaissance interior work rather than a single unified style. It is recognised for its Portuguese colonial influence and is listed as a heritage asset by IPHAN.
Photo: Halley Pacheco de Oliveira (CC BY-SA 3.0)
History
Founded in 1565 as a Portuguese captaincy, Rio de Janeiro became capital of the State of Brazil in 1763 and, after 1808, seat of the Portuguese royal court itself, transplanted there when Queen Maria I's government fled Europe — the only time in modern history a colonising power's capital moved into one of its own colonies. The city kept that rank through the 1822 War of Independence, through the Empire of Brazil, and through the early republic, losing the title only in 1960, when the capital moved to Brasília. Nearly two centuries as a seat of government and court left a compact historic core built up in overlapping fashions: Portuguese colonial churches decorated across generations, then the eclectic civic architecture of the early twentieth-century republic. A single mountain rising straight from that same city later carried the concrete Christ that became its best-known image.