Cosme Velho

This is a day for leaving the cars behind and letting the city carry you. From the cool forests of Cosme Velho to the water's edge at Urca, the itinerary arcs across the zones that make Rio what it is — vertiginous, theatrical, unhurried — without covering so much ground that it loses its shape.

Cosme Velho and the Rack Railway

An Uber from Santa Teresa deposits you at Cosme Velho Station a little after eight — a low colonial structure tucked below the trees at the foot of the mountain, with the smell of the forest already present. The rack railway that departs from here is one of the city's oldest pieces of infrastructure: inaugurated by Emperor Dom Pedro II on 9 October 1884, it was initially steam-hauled, electrified in 1910 as the first railway in Brazil to make that change, and re-equipped in 2019 with Swiss-built Stadler Rail cars that recover energy on the descent to power the climb. The line uses the Riggenbach rack system — a fixed steel ladder rail, invented by the Swiss engineer Niklaus Riggenbach in the 1860s, that meshes with a pinion on the locomotive to hold the train on gradients that ordinary wheel-on-rail friction could not manage. The line runs 3.8 kilometres (2.4 miles) at gradients reaching nearly thirty percent, rising through the interior of Tijuca National Park — the world's largest urban forest — to the summit of Corcovado at 710 metres (2,329 feet).

The journey takes about twenty minutes and is worth attending to: the Atlantic Forest closes around the car almost immediately, monkeys occasionally visible in the canopy, the city audible but not yet seen. At the summit, the Christ the Redeemer statue arrives suddenly and at scale.

Cristo Redentor is the world's largest Art Deco sculpture — 30 metres (98 feet) tall on an 8-metre (26-foot) pedestal — and its construction was a genuinely international undertaking. The project was designed by Rio-born engineer Heitor da Silva Costa and artist Carlos Oswald, who arrived at the now-familiar pose of open arms after initial sketches had Christ holding a cross and a globe. French sculptor Paul Landowski, working in his Paris studio, built the figure in clay sections — carving the head and hands at full scale — which were then shipped to Brazil, reconstructed in reinforced concrete, and clad in approximately six million soapstone tiles. Romanian sculptor Gheorghe Leonida, commissioned by Landowski, carved the face. Construction ran from 1922 to 1931, with all materials transported up the mountain via the very railway you have just ridden. The statue was dedicated on 12 October 1931. Tickets should be booked online in advance and include a timed entry slot; on clear mornings, the view takes in the full sweep of the city, the bays, and the coast.