Sítio Roberto Burle Marx
Interesting facts
- The facade of the studio building is the granite front of a neoclassical townhouse demolished in central Rio, which Burle Marx salvaged and rebuilt here.
- Carved stonework rescued from demolished colonial buildings is set throughout the gardens, including a sculptural stone wall beside the lake in front of his house.
- At least 50 plants carry Burle Marx's name, a measure of his role as a plant explorer in the Brazilian forests.
- Burle Marx is said to have started collecting plants at the age of six, decades before he bought the estate.
- The site includes about 12,000 square metres of plant nurseries and a library of roughly 4,000 titles.
- The Loggia was built as a studio for his large-format paintings and is decorated with blue tiles in a modern take on Portuguese azulejos.
- A party hall known as the Stone Kitchen is one of the seven main buildings on the estate.
- The 18th-century chapel of Saint Anthony is still used by the people of Barra de Guaratiba for Sunday Mass, weddings, baptisms and the saint's feast.
- With its 2021 inscription, the Sítio became Brazil's 23rd World Heritage Site, recognised as the laboratory of the modern tropical garden.
Why it is worth it
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. This was the home and living laboratory of Roberto Burle Marx, the landscape architect who gave modern Brazil its gardens, and the Sítio Roberto Burle Marx in Barra de Guaratiba holds one of the world's most important collections of tropical and subtropical plants, more than 3,500 species. In 2021 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List for its modernist design and its role in environmental and cultural conservation.
Burle Marx and his brother Siegfried bought the estate, then called Sítio Santo Antônio da Bica, in 1949. It began as a nursery for the plants he was gathering on expeditions into the Brazilian forest with botanists and architects, a practice of studying species in their own habitat that he learned from the botanist Henrique Lahmeyer de Mello Barreto. Over the decades the collection grew into gardens and open-air nurseries, rich in aroids, palms, bromeliads, cycads, heliconias, marantas and velloziaceae, set against the site's own mangrove, restinga and Atlantic Forest. The estate covers more than 400,000 square metres.
On the property stand an old farmhouse and a small chapel dedicated to Saint Anthony, dating from 1690 and damaged when French raiders sacked it in 1710; both were restored. Burle Marx made the farmhouse his home from 1973 until his death on 4 June 1994. He had already donated the estate to the national heritage institute IPHAN in 1985, and in 1999 the house opened as a museum, keeping its rooms and more than 3,000 objects: folk art and craft he collected, and his own paintings, drawings and designs, for he was also a painter, sculptor and designer. The ashes of the Brazilian singer Renato Russo were scattered in the garden in 1996.
Getting there
The estate is in Barra de Guaratiba, in the West Zone of the city of Rio de Janeiro, about 16 km from the neighbourhood of Sepetiba. The nearest international airport is Rio de Janeiro Galeão – Tom Jobim International Airport (GIG), about 38 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Roberto Burle Marx was a Brazilian landscape architect whose designs of parks and gardens made him world-famous. He is credited with having introduced modernist landscape architecture to Brazil. He was known as a modern nature artist and a public urban space designer. His work had a great influence on tropical garden design in the 20th century. Water gardens were a popular theme in his work. He was deftly able to transfer traditional artistic expressions such as graphic design, tapestry and folk art into his landscape designs. He also designed fabrics, jewellery and stage sets.
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