Rio de Janeiro

Guanabara Bay was home to the Tupinambá when Portuguese navigators sailed into it in January 1502 and named it the River of January. The French settled first, on an island in the bay; Estácio de Sá founded the Portuguese city on 1 March 1565 to drive them out. Rio grew as a port, and when gold was found in Minas Gerais in the late 17th century it became the outlet for the mines, and in 1763 the capital of colonial Brazil moved here from Salvador. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans were landed at the Valongo Wharf, and the streets around the port became known as Little Africa.

In 1808 the Portuguese court fled Napoleon and settled in Rio, and the city gained a botanical garden, a royal library and the institutions of a European capital. After independence in 1822 it remained the capital of the Brazilian Empire and then, from 1889, of the republic. The first half of the 20th century brought broad avenues, the Sugarloaf cable car in 1912, Copacabana's growth as a beach suburb and, in 1931, the statue of Christ the Redeemer on Corcovado.

The capital moved to Brasília in 1960; the city became the state of Guanabara and in 1975 was merged into the state of Rio de Janeiro. Decades of growth on the hillsides and in the north and west were followed by a run of world events — the 2007 Pan American Games, the 2014 World Cup final at the Maracanã, the 2016 Olympic Games and the G20 summit in 2024 — and in 2012 its landscape between the mountains and the sea was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

People from the city are cariocas, and the carioca manner — informal, witty and lived outdoors — is known across Brazil. Samba took shape in the early 20th century in Little Africa around the port and in the hillside communities of the north, and the city's samba schools now spend the year preparing for Carnival, when they parade competitively through the Sambadrome while street blocos take over the neighbourhoods. Bossa nova developed in Rio in the late 1950s, and Tom Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes made Ipanema famous with 'The Girl from Ipanema'. Funk carioca, a genre unique to Rio and Brazil, has a strong following today.

Football divides the city between Flamengo, Fluminense, Vasco da Gama and Botafogo, and the Fla–Flu derby at the Maracanã is one of the sport's great fixtures. Beach culture is a social world of its own, with footvolley, volleyball and vendors calling their wares along the sand. On New Year's Eve crowds dressed in white fill Copacabana, and some offer flowers to Iemanjá, the sea goddess of Candomblé and Umbanda.

The city's religious life mixes Catholic churches, a fast-growing evangelical movement and Afro-Brazilian religions. The arts are anchored in the centre's theatres, museums and libraries, and the Santa Teresa hills have long drawn artists.

The 2022 census counted 6,211,223 people in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, and the metropolitan area, which includes Niterói across the bay and the large municipalities of the Baixada Fluminense, has around 13 million. The city is divided into zones: the beachside Zona Sul, the old centre, the dense, working-class Zona Norte and the fast-growing west, part of which became a new Southwest Zone in September 2025.

The economy rests on oil — Petrobras has its headquarters here — together with services, finance, the media industry around TV Globo, and tourism. The gap between the richer districts and the rest is wide: hundreds of favelas climb the hills among and beyond the wealthy neighbourhoods, many dominated by drug factions or militias, and security policy is a constant political issue. For many workers the commute from the north and west is long, by train, BRT or bus.

The day starts early and ends late. Cariocas walk, run and cycle along the beachfront before work, meet friends at the corner boteco after it, and spend weekends on the sand or at a football match. The summer rains bring floods and landslides in poorer hillside areas, and sewage still flows into parts of Guanabara Bay.

Feijoada, the black-bean stew with chunks of meat, is traditionally served on Fridays and Saturdays, with rice, couve (sautéed collard greens), farofa (toasted cassava flour) and orange slices. The boteco is the city's real kitchen: bolinhos de bacalhau (salt-cod fritters), pastéis (fried pastries filled with cheese, meat or shrimp), fried sardines and plates of cured meats, eaten with chope, draught beer served ice-cold with a head of foam. Filé Oswaldo Aranha, a steak covered with fried garlic and served with rice, farofa and fried potatoes, is named in honour of the diplomat Oswaldo Aranha, a regular in Rio's restaurants in the 1930s.

The beach has its own menu, carried across the sand by vendors: Biscoito Globo, crackers of cassava starch, with iced mate tea and cold coconut water. Açaí is eaten frozen and sweet, in a bowl with granola and banana, and juice bars across the city blend tropical fruit to order.

For quick, cheap meals cariocas use the comida a quilo restaurants, buffets paid for by weight, and galeto houses serving spit-roasted young chicken. The caipirinha, made with cachaça, lime and sugar, is the default cocktail.