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.