Higher up the hill, the Parque das Ruínas — officially renamed Parque Glória Maria after the celebrated journalist in 2023 — occupies the shell of what was once the grandest private salon in Belle Époque Rio. The house had belonged to Laurinda Santos Lobo, a prominent patron of the arts in the early twentieth century who hosted saraus at which Villa-Lobos, Isadora Duncan, and Anatole France were among the guests. After her death in 1946, the building was looted and abandoned for decades before the city took possession of the ruins in the early 1990s. In 1997, after an architectural contest, the site was transformed into a cultural centre: the winning design by Ernani Freire kept the original brick ruin and inserted new steel and glass structures within it, creating a hybrid that reads simultaneously as restoration and as ruin. The top-floor terrace looks out across the Baía de Guanabara, the Pão de Açúcar, the Cristo Redentor, and the Arcos da Lapa below — the whole geography of Rio laid out in one view, with the light falling at its best in the late afternoon.
Evening in Santa Teresa
From the Parque das Ruínas the neighbourhood opens up around you. The bondinho is worth riding if the afternoon has left energy for it — the yellow tram departs from the Estação Carioca near the Largo da Carioca, crosses the Arcos da Lapa, and winds up through the cobbled streets of Santa Teresa to its terminus, a forty-minute circuit that returns you to the same point. If you're staying on the hill, Santa Teresa itself has a cluster of bars and restaurants around the Largo dos Guimarães that animate after dark. For those based lower down, Glória and Flamengo are a short ride and keep you within easy reach of both the historic centre and the southern beaches without the full commitment to Ipanema.