Nearly five hundred years have seen
RIO
DE JANEIRO transformed from a
fortified outpost on the rim of an
unknown continent into one of the
world's great cities. Its recorded
past is tied exclusively to the
legacy of the colonialism on which
it was founded. No lasting vestige
survives of the civilization of the
Tamoios
people, who inhabited the land
before the Portuguese arrived, and
the city's history effectively
begins on January 1, 1502, when a
Portuguese
captain, André Gonçalves, steered
his craft into Guanabara Bay,
thinking he was heading into the
mouth of a great river. The city
takes its name from this event - Rio
de Janeiro means the "River of
January". In 1555, the French,
keen to stake a claim on the New
World, established a garrison near
the Sugar Loaf mountain, and the
Governor General of Brazil, Mem de Sá,
made an unsuccessful attempt to oust
them. It was left to his son, Estácio
de Sá, finally to defeat them in
1567, though he fell - mortally
wounded - during the battle. The
city then acquired its official
name, São Sebastião de Rio de
Janeiro, after the infant king of
Portugal, and Rio began to develop
on and around the Morro do Castelo -
in front of where Santos Dumont
airport now stands.
With Bahia the centre of the new
Portuguese colony, initial progress
in Rio was slow, and only in the
1690s, when gold was
discovered in the neighbouring state
of Minas Gerais, did the city's
fortunes look up, as it became the
control and taxation centre for the
gold trade. During the seventeenth
century the sugar cane
economy brought new wealth to Rio,
but despite being a prosperous
entrepôt, the city remained poorly
developed. For the most part it
comprised a collection of narrow
streets and alleys, cramped and
dirty, bordered by habitations built
from lath and mud. However, Rio's
strategic importance grew as a
result of the struggle with the
Spanish over territories to the
south (which would become Uruguay),
and in 1763 the city replaced Bahia
(Salvador) as Brazil's capital city.
By the eighteenth century, the
majority of Rio's inhabitants were African
slaves. Unlike other foreign
colonies, in Brazil miscegenation
became the rule rather than the
exception: even the Catholic Church
tolerated procreation between the
races, on the grounds that it
supplied more souls to be saved. As
a result, virtually nothing in Rio
remained untouched by African
customs, beliefs and behaviour - a
state of affairs that clearly
influences today's city, too, with
its mixture of Afro-Brazilian music,
spiritualist cults and cuisine.
In March 1808, having fled before
the advance of Napoleon Bonaparte's
forces during the Peninsular War, Dom
João VI of Portugal arrived in
Rio, bringing with him some 1500
nobles of the Portuguese royal
court. So enamoured of Brazil was he
that after Napoleon's defeat in 1815
he declined to return to Portugal
and instead proclaimed "The
United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil
and the Algarves, of this side and
the far side of the sea, and the
Guinea Coast of Africa" - the
greatest colonial empire of
the age, with Rio de Janeiro as its
capital. During Dom João's reign
the Enlightenment came to Rio, the
city's streets were paved and lit,
and Rio acquired a new prosperity
based on coffee.
Royal patronage allowed the arts
and sciences to flourish, and Rio
was visited by many of the
illustrious European names of the
day. In their literary and artistic
work they left a vivid account of
contemporary Rio society - colonial,
patriarchal and slave-based. Yet
while conveying images of Rio's
street life, fashions and natural
beauty, they don't give any hint of
the heat, stench and squalor of life
in a tropical city of over 100,000
inhabitants, without a sewerage
system. Behind the imperial gloss,
Rio was still mostly a slum of dark,
airless habitations, intermittently
scourged by outbreaks of yellow
fever, its economy completely
reliant upon human slavery.
However, by the late nineteenth
century, Rio had lost much of its
mercantilist colonial flavour and
started to develop as a modern city:
trams and trains replaced sedans,
the first sewerage system was
inaugurated in 1864, a telegraph
link was established between Rio and
London, and a tunnel was excavated
which opened the way to Copacabana,
as people left the crowded centre
and looked for new living space.
Under the administration of the
engineer Francisco Pereira Passos
, Rio went through a period of urban
reconstruction that all but
destroyed the last vestiges of its
colonial design. The city was torn
apart by a period of frenzied
building between 1900 and 1910, its
monumental splendour modelled on the
Paris of the Second Empire. Public
buildings, grand avenues, libraries
and parks were all built to
embellish the city, lending it the
dignity perceived as characteristic
of the great capital cities of the
Old World.
During the 1930s Rio
enjoyed international renown,
buttressed by Hollywood images and
the patronage of the
first-generation jet set. Rio became
the nation's commercial centre, too,
and a new wave of modernization
swept the city, leaving little more
than the Catholic churches as
monuments to the past. Even the
removal of the country's political
administration to the new federal
capital of Brasília in 1960 did
nothing to discourage the
developers. Today, with the centre
rebuilt many times since colonial
days, most interest lies not in
Rio's buildings and monuments but
firmly in the beaches to the
south of the city. For more than
sixty years these have been Rio's
heart and soul, providing a constant
source of recreation and income for cariocas.
In stark contrast, Rio's favelas
, clinging precariously to the
hillsides, show another side to the
city, saying much about the
divisions within it. Although not
exclusive to the capital, these
slums seem all the more harsh in Rio
because of the plenty and beauty
that surround them.
