The Most Beautiful Places in Rio de Janeiro
12 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Rio de Janeiro are Sugarloaf Mountain, Christ the Redeemer and Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden. The list covers 12 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Rio de Janeiro grew up in the gaps between granite. Steep domes and ridges of ancient rock rise straight from Guanabara Bay and the Atlantic, and between them the city fills narrow strips of beach and valley, while the Tijuca Forest covers the mountains in its middle. UNESCO recognised this meeting of city, mountain and sea as a cultural landscape in 2012, the first time a large city was inscribed for its setting rather than its buildings alone.
The peaks are the landmarks. Sugarloaf Mountain stands at the mouth of the bay, reached since 1912 by a cable car in two stages, and on the summit of Corcovado the Art Deco statue of Christ the Redeemer, completed in 1931, opens its arms over the city. Inland, in the Serra dos Órgãos, the Dedo de Deus points skyward like a raised finger.
The city's other treasures are made by hand. The Botanical Garden, founded in 1808, is known for its avenue of towering royal palms, and the Sítio Roberto Burle Marx preserves the estate where the great landscape architect gathered his plants. The São Bento Monastery hides a gilded baroque interior behind a plain facade, the Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading stacks its books in a neo-Manueline hall of carved wood, and the Escadaria Selarón climbs through Lapa under tiles that the artist Jorge Selarón collected from around the world. On the waterfront, Santiago Calatrava's Museum of Tomorrow reaches out over the bay.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sugarloaf Mountain | Mountain | |
| 2 | Christ the Redeemer | Sculpture | |
| 3 | Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden | Botanical garden | |
| 4 | Museum of Tomorrow | Science museum | |
| 5 | Sugarloaf Cable Car | Aerial tramway | |
| 6 | São Bento Monastery, Rio de Janeiro | Abbey | |
| 7 | Corcovado | Mountain | |
| 8 | Escadaria Selarón | Stairs | |
| 9 | Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading | Library building | |
| 10 | Sítio Roberto Burle Marx | Historic garden | |
| 11 | Niterói Contemporary Art Museum | Museum | |
| 12 | Dedo de Deus | Summit |
01 Sugarloaf Mountain
Pão de Açúcar
Brazil · 7.4 km from Rio de Janeiro22.949° S 43.157° W
Image by guertzen from Pixabay Sugarloaf Mountain is the rock that makes Rio's harbour instantly recognisable: a bare, rounded dome of gneiss rising 396 metres straight out of the sea at the mouth of Guanabara Bay.
Did you know? The cable car has carried around 40 million passengers since it opened, and each current cabin holds up to 65 people.
02 Christ the Redeemer
Cristo Redentor
Brazil · 4.9 km from Rio de Janeiro22.952° S 43.210° W
Image by FlaviaPadula from Pixabay The statue is as much a French project as a Brazilian one.
Did you know? Building it cost the equivalent of about US$250,000 at the time.
03 Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden
Jardim Botânico do Rio de Janeiro
Brazil · 6.8 km from Rio de Janeiro22.968° S 43.224° W
Image by anapaulafelic from Pixabay The garden began as a royal experiment. In 1808, soon after the Portuguese court fled Napoleon's armies and settled in Rio, the prince regent João, later King John VI, founded it as a place to acclimatise spices and other useful plants brought from the East Indies.
Did you know? The herbarium held some 600,000 dried specimens in 2014 and was adding about 20,000 more each year.
04 Museum of Tomorrow
Museu do Amanhã
Brazil · 3.7 km from Rio de Janeiro22.894° S 43.179° W
Image by LyraSid from Pixabay The Museum of Tomorrow stands at the end of Pier Mauá in Rio de Janeiro, reaching out into Guanabara Bay like a skeleton of white steel. It was designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, who said he drew inspiration from the bromeliads of Rio's botanical garden, and it opened on 17 December 2015.
Did you know? Calatrava's building earned LEED Gold certification, and in 2017 it won the MIPIM Award for Best Innovative Green Building for its solar fins and bay-water cooling.
05 Sugarloaf Cable Car
Bondinho do Pão de Açúcar
Brazil · 7.1 km from Rio de Janeiro22.956° S 43.167° W
Image by nuno_lopes from Pixabay The Sugarloaf Cable Car lifts visitors in two stages from the shore at Praia Vermelha to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain, the granite dome that guards the entrance to Guanabara Bay.
Did you know? On the upper section the cabins reach about 10 metres per second, or 36 km/h, while the lower section runs at up to 6 metres per second.
06 São Bento Monastery, Rio de Janeiro
Mosteiro de São Bento
Brazil · 3.7 km from Rio de Janeiro22.897° S 43.178° W
Halley Pacheco de Oliveira · CC BY-SA 3.0 Benedictine monks arriving from Bahia founded the monastery on a hill above Rio's harbor in 1590. Construction of the church that stands today began in 1633 and was finished in 1671, with an additional annex completed in 1755 — a building campaign that stretched across more than a century.
Did you know? The stone for the building was quarried at Morro da Viúva, in what is now Rio's Flamengo district.
07 Corcovado
Brazil · 5 km from Rio de Janeiro22.953° S 43.212° W
Image by guertzen from Pixabay Corcovado, "the hunchback", is a 710-metre granite peak rising abruptly from the middle of Rio de Janeiro, entirely inside the city yet wrapped in the rainforest of Tijuca National Park.
Did you know? A Vincentian priest, Pedro Maria Boss, first proposed a Christian monument on the peak in the 1850s to honour Princess Isabel, but it was never approved.
08 Escadaria Selarón
Brazil · 3.5 km from Rio de Janeiro22.915° S 43.179° W
Donatas Dabravolskas · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Escadaria Selarón is a public stairway turned into one man's life work. It climbs 215 steps and about 125 metres from the Rua Joaquim Silva in Lapa up towards the Santa Teresa hill in central Rio de Janeiro, and every riser, wall and landing is covered in fragments of tile, ceramic and mirror.
Did you know? Selarón was born in 1947 in Limache, Chile, and had lived and worked in more than fifty countries before he arrived in Rio.
09 Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading
Real Gabinete Português de Leitura
Brazil · 3.1 km from Rio de Janeiro22.905° S 43.182° W
Stegop · CC BY-SA 4.0 Behind a carved stone façade on a narrow street in central Rio de Janeiro lies one of the most spectacular reading rooms in the world.
Did you know? The society behind the library was founded on 14 May 1837 by 43 Portuguese immigrants, many of them political refugees.
10 Sítio Roberto Burle Marx
Brazil · 31.5 km from Nova Iguaçu23.024° S 43.545° W
Halley Pacheco de Oliveira · CC BY-SA 3.0 Ranks of bromeliads, philodendrons and palms collected from across Brazil's forests grow at the foot of a forested hill on the western edge of Rio de Janeiro, arranged with a painter's eye for colour and mass.
Did you know? Burle Marx is said to have started collecting plants at the age of six, decades before he bought the estate.
11 Niterói Contemporary Art Museum
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói
Brazil · 3.5 km from Niterói22.908° S 43.126° W
Image by guertzen from Pixabay In Niterói, Oscar Niemeyer let the site do half the work. On a rocky promontory above Boa Viagem beach, across Guanabara Bay from Rio de Janeiro, a white concrete saucer seems to have just landed on a single stem, its rim flaring outward over a shallow pool.
Did you know? Its holdings include works by Mira Schendel, Tomie Ohtake, Abraham Palatnik and Frans Krajcberg, tracing Brazilian art from the 1950s to the 1990s.
12 Dedo de Deus
Brazil · 15.5 km from Petrópolis22.500° S 43.050° W
Eurico Zimbres FGEL/UERJ · CC BY-SA 2.5 From the road that climbs out of the Guanabara lowlands towards Teresópolis, one summit in the Serra dos Órgãos refuses to look like a mountain at all.
Did you know? The hard granite dyke that holds up the Finger and its neighbouring towers dates from the Cambrian period, far younger than the surrounding gneiss.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Rio de Janeiro?
- On our list, Sugarloaf Mountain ranks first, followed by Christ the Redeemer and Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden.
- How tall is Christ the Redeemer?
- The statue is about 30 metres tall, standing on a pedestal of about 8 metres, with arms spanning about 28 metres. It was completed in 1931 on the summit of Corcovado.
- When did the Sugarloaf cable car open?
- The first stage of the Sugarloaf cable car opened in 1912, making it one of the earliest passenger cable cars in the world. The route runs from Praia Vermelha via Morro da Urca to the summit.
- Who made the Selarón Steps?
- The Chilean-born artist Jorge Selarón began covering the steps in Lapa with tiles in 1990 and kept working on them for more than two decades, using tiles sent to him from many countries.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Rio de Janeiro?
- In our collection, the places in Rio de Janeiro are most often mountains (2), summits (1), botanical gardens (1) and historic gardens (1).
- How many places are on this list in Rio de Janeiro?
- The list covers 12 places.