Porto Maravilha Harbor Walk

The Museu do Amanhã, or Museum of Tomorrow, is recognizable by its long, white, cantilevered roof and a design that appears to float above the water of the Guanabara Bay. Designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, the structure…

Praça Mauá is defined by a central, eight-and-a-half-meter-tall bronze statue of the nineteenth-century industrialist Irineu Evangelista de Sousa, better known as the Viscount of Mauá. He stands atop a stone column, gazing over a vast…

You can identify the Rio Museum of Art by the fluid, undulating concrete canopy that stretches over its roof, resembling a wave suspended in the air. This striking architectural feature unites two disparate structures: the early…

The Largo de São Francisco da Prainha is defined by its cobblestone ground and the surrounding colorful colonial buildings that sit at the foot of Morro da Conceição. Before the Porto do Rio de Janeiro was built in the early twentieth…

Pedra do Sal is identified by a steep, massive stone slab cut into the base of Conceição Hill. Once sitting directly by the sea, this rock served as a landing point for salt shipments in the seventeenth century. Enslaved Africans were…

The Cais do Valongo is identified by its exposed, uneven cobblestone paving, which sits in a sunken area near the port. Built in eighteen eleven, this wharf served as the primary arrival point for hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans…

The Etnias mural is a five-hundred-sixty-foot-long spray-painted wall featuring five massive, brightly colored indigenous faces. Created by Brazilian artist Eduardo Kobra for the twenty-sixteen Summer Olympics, the mural stretches fifteen…

AquaRio, the largest marine aquarium in South America, occupies a massive, five-story structure in the Port Zone of Rio de Janeiro. Its exterior appearance—a sleek, industrial-style building—betrays its former life as a warehouse for the…