Little Africa Heritage Walk

The Etnias mural covers three thousand square meters of an old warehouse wall with the faces of five indigenous people. Eduardo Kobra painted these figures from Ethiopia, Brazil, Thailand, Europe, and Alaska to mark the twenty sixteen…

The Largo de São Francisco da Prainha holds a small, lime-green church that seems to lean into the street. It was built in the early eighteenth century for sailors and fishermen who worked the nearby bay. In the late seventeen hundreds, a…

The rounded, worn stone slab embedded in the street marks the historic heart of Little Africa. This was the city’s primary salt market in the nineteenth century, where enslaved people unloaded bags of salt from ships arriving at the nearby…

The Praça dos Estivadores features a central, weathered bronze statue of a stevedore hoisting a heavy sack onto his shoulder. This small, triangular patch of green in the port district commemorates the dockworkers who once fueled Rio de…

The Hanging Garden of Valongo features a series of stone terraces carved directly into the steep hillside, held back by thick granite retaining walls. It covers the slope where the Valongo Wharf once served as the primary entry point for…

The Cais do Valongo is a stone wharf in the port area of Rio de Janeiro, defined by layers of uneven, weathered basalt blocks. Between eighteen eleven and eighteen thirty-one, this site served as the primary entry point for enslaved…

The Institute of Research and New Black Memory occupies a narrow, multi-story building in Gamboa with a facade painted in vibrant colors, decorated with murals that depict Afro-Brazilian heritage. This place serves as a repository for the…

The Museu da História e da Cultura Afro-Brasileira sits inside a bright yellow colonial building with blue trim, wedged into the historic Gamboa neighborhood. It functions as a public archive for the city’s African heritage, holding…