Porto Maravilha Harbor Walk

The Museu do Amanhã extends into the Guanabara Bay on a long pier, its roof composed of enormous white steel wings that shift position throughout the day to follow the path of the sun. Designed by Santiago Calatrava, the museum ignores…

Praça Mauá is defined by a wide, paved expanse that bridges the city center and the docks, punctuated by the curved, white silhouette of the Museum of Tomorrow. It served as the primary port entrance for Rio de Janeiro for decades. In the…

The Rio Museum of Art consists of two buildings joined by a flowing, wave-like concrete roof. One structure is a former police palace from the early twentieth century, while the other is a modern bus terminal. Architect Thiago Bernardes…

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 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 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 massive, dark gray concrete box rising near the water is AquaRio. It occupies a former warehouse space in the old port zone, repurposed into the largest marine aquarium in South America. The design relies on a central tank holding over…