Corcovado

Interesting facts

Emperor Pedro II opened the Corcovado rack railway in 1884, and in 1910 it became the first electrified railway in Brazil.

The line is one of the few railways still powered by three-phase current through two overhead wires, tackling gradients of up to 30 percent.

Its Swiss-built trains, introduced in 2019, recover energy by regenerative braking on the way down, cutting overall power use by about three quarters.

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.

Early designs for the summit statue showed Christ holding a globe and a cross; the open-armed figure was chosen only later.

The statue weighs about 635 tonnes, and the concrete for its base was shipped from Limhamn in Sweden.

At the 1931 inauguration Guglielmo Marconi was meant to switch on the floodlights by radio from Rome, but bad weather forced them to be lit on site.

A 2010 restoration used over 60,000 pieces of soapstone from the original quarry; the pale stone is now scarce, so replacements are gradually darker.

Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein are among the famous visitors who made their way up to the summit.

Why it is worth it

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. Its summit is a sheer dome of rock, reputedly the highest such formation in Brazil, and it would be a landmark even without what stands on top of it. On the south face, climbers have long used dozens of established routes.

The statue of Christ the Redeemer was built between 1922 and 1931 after a campaign by the Catholic Circle of Rio, funded mainly by donations from Brazilian Catholics. The Brazilian engineer Heitor da Silva Costa led the project, the French sculptor Paul Landowski created the figure, the Romanian sculptor Gheorghe Leonida modelled the face, and the French engineer Albert Caquot designed the reinforced-concrete structure. The figure is 30 metres tall on an 8-metre pedestal, its arms span 28 metres, and its outer layer is soapstone, chosen for durability. Opened on 12 October 1931, it is the world's largest Art Deco sculpture and was voted one of the New 7 Wonders of the World. A small chapel beneath it was consecrated in 2006, and lightning strikes have more than once required repairs to its fingers and head.

From the platform at the statue's feet the whole city is laid out: downtown Rio, Sugarloaf Mountain, the Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon, the beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema, the Maracanã stadium and the hillside favelas. Cloud frequently wraps the summit, so a clear day is worth waiting for, and crowds are heavy all year. The mountain has its own place in Brazilian culture, most famously through Antônio Carlos Jobim's bossa nova song "Corcovado" of 1960.

Getting there

Corcovado rises over the Botafogo district, about 3 km away. The summit is reached by the 3.8 km Corcovado Rack Railway, opened in 1884, which takes about 20 minutes; by a narrow road; or on foot by a trail on the south side that starts in Parque Lage. The final climb to the statue is 223 steps, or lifts and escalators. Santos Dumont Airport (SDU), Rio's downtown airport, is about 7 km away.

Corcovado

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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