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Rio de Janeiro
Brazil's seaside icon of beaches, mountains, and Carnival
Few cities are so dramatically wedded to their landscape as Rio de Janeiro, where forested granite peaks plunge straight into the sea and a colossal statue of Christ keeps watch from the clouds. Cradled between mountain and ocean, the Cidade Maravilhosa is a sensual sprawl of golden beaches, samba, and dizzying social contrast, its glittering seafront neighbourhoods rising in the shadow of hillside favelas. Home to nearly fourteen million people across its metro region, Rio remains Brazil's emotional capital, the stage for the world's most famous Carnival.
The city ribbons around Guanabara Bay and the Atlantic on a narrow coastal strip threaded by abrupt granite domes, the most famous being Sugarloaf and the hunchbacked Corcovado that bears the Christ the Redeemer statue. Tijuca, one of the world's largest urban rainforests, blankets the hills within the city limits. The beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema curve along the open ocean, while tunnels and viaducts stitch together a metropolis squeezed by terrain that has shaped its development for five centuries, leaving it both spectacularly scenic and chronically congested.
Portuguese colonists founded the city in 1565 to drive out French interlopers, naming it for the January river they mistakenly thought they had found. Rio grew rich on sugar, gold, and slavery, served as Brazil's capital from 1763 until Brasilia took the title in 1960, and even briefly housed the Portuguese crown during the Napoleonic Wars. Though it ceded political and economic primacy to Brasilia and Sao Paulo, Rio retains an outsized cultural pull, host to Olympic Games, World Cup finals, and a Carnival that draws millions.