Dedo de Deus
Interesting facts
- Foreign climbers had reportedly judged the Finger impossible before five local men with no mountaineering experience reached the top in 1912.
- The 1912 team included a blacksmith, José Teixeira Guimarães, and a hunter, Raul Carneiro, helped on the approach by a boy named João Rodrigues de Lima.
- The climbers carried a Brazilian flag with them to plant on the summit, wanting the first ascent to be a national achievement.
- The hard granite dyke that holds up the Finger and its neighbouring towers dates from the Cambrian period, far younger than the surrounding gneiss.
- Its silhouette has featured in the heraldry of Rio de Janeiro state since 1892, and the peak is protected as a heritage site by Brazil's IPHAN.
- Next to the Finger rises the Escalavrado, a 1,490-metre peak, and the classic view of both is from the Soberbo lookout on the road to Teresópolis.
- The story of the first ascent was told in the documentary Caminho Teixeira, shown at the Trento Film Festival in 2011.
Why it is worth it
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. Dedo de Deus, "God's Finger", rises to 1,692 metres as a single blade of rock beside a cluster of lower knuckles, so that the whole ridge reads as a hand with its index finger raised to the sky. On a clear day the silhouette carries roughly 50 kilometres to Rio de Janeiro, and it has become the emblem of the state: the profile of the range with the Finger standing out is on Rio de Janeiro's flag and coat of arms, and on the civic symbols of Teresópolis, Magé and Guapimirim as well.
The shape is a lesson in geology. The Serra dos Órgãos is built of Neoproterozoic granitic gneiss, roughly 620 million years old, and the Portuguese named it after church organs, whose rows of pipes they saw in its eroded vertical rock. Dedo de Deus owes its extreme form to a thick dyke of younger granite, harder than the surrounding stone, which was left standing while the land around it wore away. The peak sits within the Serra dos Órgãos National Park whose highest point, Pedra do Sino, reaches 2,263 metres.
The Finger also has a place in Brazilian climbing history. On 9 April 1912 five men from Teresópolis, José Guimarães Teixeira, Raul Carneiro and the brothers Américo, Alexandre and Acácio de Oliveira, reached the top, and the event is widely remembered as the start of mountaineering in Brazil. Their line, the Via Teixeira, is still the classic way up: a steep approach trail, a long section protected by fixed steel cables and then around 180 metres of moderate roped climbing, with a full day of eight to twelve hours needed for the round trip. Most people, though, meet the peak from below, where its improbable outline is the whole point.
Getting there
Dedo de Deus lies in the municipality of Guapimirim, about 8 km from the town itself, and around 40 km from Rio de Janeiro Galeão – Tom Jobim International Airport (GIG). On the BR-116 highway, the Mirante do Soberbo lookout near the entrance to Teresópolis is the best-known place to see the Finger and its "hand" in profile. The summit itself is for experienced climbers or guided parties only.
On these lists
-22.50000, -43.05000per Wikidata