Through the Serra and Down to Rio
Back on the BR-040, the road drops off the serra through Xerém — a district of Duque de Caxias at the foot of the Petrópolis hills, where the Serra Fluminense gives way to the Baixada — with a fuel stop at the Shell Express on the way through. The landscape flattens as the city of Rio begins to absorb the outskirts, and the approach into the city follows the urban arterials northwest of the centre.
Santa Teresa and the Lapa
The afternoon is given to Santa Teresa, the hilltop neighbourhood that rises above the Lapa arches on the edge of the historic centre. The neighbourhood's origins lie in the eighteenth century, when the construction of the Aqueduto da Carioca — the great double-arched aqueduct now known as the Arcos da Lapa — brought water to the hillside and accelerated the settlement of the area around the Convent of Santa Teresa. The convent, founded in 1750 by two sisters of a wealthy family as the first women's convent in Rio de Janeiro, gave the neighbourhood its name.
As the city grew and epidemics made the lowlands dangerous, Petrópolis became a refuge of the imperial aristocracy — but Santa Teresa served a similar function closer to hand, filling with elegant mansions built by European immigrants and wealthy Cariocas who wanted the hilltop air without the journey to the serra. The neighbourhood's bohemian reputation took firmer shape in the 1960s, when artists sought refuge here during the military dictatorship, making it a centre of political and artistic life. That layer sits alongside — and sometimes inside — the older one of mansions and palacetes, and the result is a neighbourhood that feels unusually dense with history for a place so close to the tourist circuits of Ipanema and Copacabana.