The City of Hills and Swamps

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Space, Nature, and the Colonial City

From its founding in 1565, Rio was a city forged by a stunning and challenging geography. Nestled on the jagged edges of the Bahia de Guanabara, one of South America's largest ports, the city's breathtaking setting lent itself more easily to rapturous odes than to large-scale settlement. Three distinct mountain massifs, with peaks as high as 1,024 meters, surrounded and interrupted the city, forming narrow valleys where their tentacular ridges cascaded down toward the bay. Lower hills and rocky outcroppings rose from these same valleys and jutted abruptly from the water, creating countless discrete enclaves of gently sloping land and protected sea. At the time of the city's founding, rivers riddled its territory, and the lower reaches of its valleys were covered with lakes and marshes. Exuberant tropical vegetation draped the hills and mountains. Such dramatic overlappings of mountain, river, marsh, and sea proved formidable barriers to continuous settlement; steep slopes impeded communication from one narrow valley to the next; rivers claimed their banks as flood plains in the rainy season; marshes harbored mosquitoes and rendered vast expanses of lowlands uninhabitable; and the sea could turn wild and eat away at the very city it sustained.

Settlers could hardly claim seamless possession of such unruly landscape. Early on, defensive exigencies exacerbated natural ones, and settlers clung together, briefly in a tiny beach enclave near the Pão de Açucar and then, from 1567, to the slopes of the now-flattened Morro do Castelo in central Rio. Over the following two centuries, as Rio grew from a small and relatively insignificant village to a great port city and the seat of the viceroyal government, urban residents ventured only tentatively from the small-lake-dotted plain bounded by the hills of Castelo, Santo Antônio, São Bento, and Conceição. As the city grew, its center gradually descended from the flanks of the Morro do Castelo toward the port's small docks and warehouses.

The uneven archipelago of dry land jutting up from the valley's lakes and marshes quickly proved inadequate for an increased population and intensified commercial traffic. Settlers responded by creating land from water, filling wetlands with earth. At first such efforts were haphazard and individual; but by the mid-seventeenth century, public authorities had begun to take an active role, authorizing the full drainage of lakes and the leveling of small hills. By the late eighteenth century, some of Rio's best-known landmarks had arisen from such machinations, among them the Passeio Público and the Largo da Carioca, which housed the fountain that dispensed much of the city's potable water through the mid-nineteenth century. Outside such public spaces, however, the creation of so much territory clouded an already ambiguous system of property rights, rendering its administration difficult. A system of ownership and land use that was founded on sixteenth-century sesmaria grants and on presumed municipal jurisdiction was incapable of neatly defining the rights and obligations of occupants living on land that they themselves had created.

The economic surge brought to the city by Brazil's early-eighteenth-century gold and diamond boom—Rio, among the chief exits for mineral exports, was also the main port of entry for African slaves and European consumer goods—propelled its promotion to capital of the viceroyalty in 1763. With commercial and bureaucratic expansion came influxes of fortune seekers, businessmen, slaves, and bureaucrats. By 1799, Rio was home to more than 43,000 inhabitants, more than a third of whom were enslaved. After 1808, the arrival of some 15,000 members and followers of the Portuguese royal court, fleeing the Napoleonic Wars, accelerated this growth; and the early coffee boom in Rio's hinterlands cemented it. By 1849, the city probably held around 206,000 souls, and by 1872 its population stood at 274,972 (see table 1).

In the short term, responses to this population boom varied widely. Settlers rendered land from marshes; houses and shacks pressed ever closer together; the poor improvised spaces in backyards, swamps, and hills; royal governors summarily expelled all classes of residents to make room for the royal court. In the long term, though, growth implied exodus from the colonial cradle. First snatching up rural land along colonial highways, and later filling the space between those spidery pathways through the familiar techniques of drainage, landfill, and leveling, settlers gradually expanded the city to the west, northwest, and south, creating in the process such neighborhoods as the Cidade Nova, São Cristóvão, Glória, Catete, and Botafogo. While some of this settlement was made possible by large-scale public works—examples include the channeling of the Saco de São Diogo into the Mangue Canal, which helped create the Cidade Nova, or the draining of Carioca Lake to create the Largo do Machado—most expansion was more haphazard, an incremental filling in of lots and open spaces by individuals hoping to lay claim to lands rendered from sweat, dirt, and garbage. The resulting patchy geography, as in the old city core, created a knot of confusion about everything from the definition of inhabitable land to ownership boundaries, occupancy rights, and jurisdictional responsibilities. In the colonial centuries, ownership and use rights were among the few public goods that municipal governors were authorized to distribute. Yet the peculiarities of Rio's geographical expansion rendered the precise administration of territory impossible, setting an...