Escadaria Selarón

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. The Chilean-born painter and ceramist Jorge Selarón, who had travelled and worked in dozens of countries before settling in Rio in 1983, began in 1990 by repairing the dilapidated steps in front of his house. He started with shards in blue, green and yellow — the colours of the Brazilian flag — and neighbours laughed at him.

The side project became an obsession. Selarón paid for materials by selling his paintings, and at first scavenged tiles from building sites and rubbish on the streets; later, visitors from all over the world sent or brought tiles from their own countries, so that the stairway became a mosaic of thousands of pieces from more than sixty nations. He never considered it complete: as soon as one section was finished he began replacing another, and he said the work would only end on the day he died. Among the tiles are around 300 that he painted himself, showing a pregnant African woman, a figure he repeated in thousands of portraits and never explained beyond calling it a personal matter from his past.

In 2005 the city of Rio listed the stairway as protected heritage and made Selarón an honorary citizen. He was found dead on the steps on 10 January 2013. By then the stairs had appeared in magazines, advertisements and music videos, among them U2's "Walk On" and Snoop Dogg's "Beautiful", and in Rio's promotional film for its 2016 Olympic bid. What makes the place worth climbing slowly is the detail: tiles with city names and flags, hand-painted panels, mirrors catching the light, and the sheer blaze of colour rising between old houses.

Getting there

The stairway links the Lapa and Santa Teresa neighbourhoods in central Rio de Janeiro, about 1 km from Santa Teresa's centre and a few minutes' walk from the Arcos da Lapa, the old aqueduct. Santos Dumont Airport (SDU), Rio's city-centre airport, is less than 2 km away.