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. Hotels in Rio de Janeiro |
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