RIO DE JANEIRO 



5022 



RIO DE JANEIRO 



THE MOST BEAUTIFUL HARBOR IN THE WORLD 



10 DE JANEIRO, re' o da zhana'ro, 

 capital of Brazil and the second largest city of 

 South America. Buenos Aires, the capital of 

 the Argentine Republic, is the first city of the 

 world south of the equator, and Rio, as it is 

 familiarly called, with a population of 1,128,- 

 637 (estimate for 1913), comes next. Rio de 

 Janeiro is 5,204 miles from London, 4,748 miles 

 from New York and 5,160 miles from New 

 Orleans. It is situated on the west side of the 

 Bay of Rio de Janeiro, which, stretching inland 

 for several miles and studded with islands and 

 surrounded by mountains, is accounted the most 

 magnificent harbor in the world. The city owes 

 much of its beauty to the fact that it is built 

 on the flat land and low, wooded hills between 

 the mountains, the spurs of which project in 

 some places almost to the margin of the bay 

 and form picturesque valleys within the city 

 limits. The residence quarters of the city fol- 

 low some of these valleys up the sides of the 

 mountains, and in other places the poorer resi- 

 dents have built their huts on the steep slopes. 

 Until the latter part of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury Rio de Janeiro was a typical Latin-Ameri- 

 can city, a picturesque Old World sort of place 

 which had its daily paper, founded in 1808, its 

 National Museum and its botanical gardens, 

 and enjoyed an enormous export trade in cof- 

 fee. Then it was a city with narrow streets, 

 poorly-built wharves and a harbor that was 

 filling up with silt so that no large ships were 

 able to dock. To-day, while retaining all of its 

 beauty and charm, it is an almost perfect ex- 

 ample of the ideal modern city, with beautiful 

 public buildings and private residences, clean, 

 asphalt streets, palm-bordered boulevards, good 

 sanitation and pure water. One of the inter- 

 esting features of this new city is a boulevard 

 which has been laid out along the shore of the 

 bay for a score of miles, at an expense of $17,- 

 000,000. This is bordered with trees, and its 

 wider parts are filled in with gardens. 



The Mangue Canal, a waterway originally 

 built for connecting the bay with a great city 

 market, has been enclosed with stone walls and 

 bordered with great, royal palm trees, and is 

 now part of a public pleasure ground. The 

 most famous street of the city is the Rua do 

 Ouvidor, a promenade lined with shops, cafes 

 and newspaper offices. There are many pub- 

 lic parks 'and gardens, for, as in most Portu- 

 guese cities, the principal buildings are grouped 

 around squares. The most famous of the parks 

 is the Botanical Garden, founded in 1808, noted 

 for its rare plants from all over the world and 

 for its avenue of royal palm trees. These trees 



LOCATION OF RIO DE JANEIRO 

 The square black spot in the corner map shows 

 the area included in the larger map. 



are not native to Brazil, but were imported 

 originally from the West Indies. In the Botani- 

 cal Garden may be seen the original "mother" 

 palm, the first to be imported, with a bronze 

 tablet on the trunk to commemorate the event. 

 Many of the public buildings, both the old 

 and the new, are magnificent. One of the most 

 notable is the National Museum, once the resi- 

 dence of the Emperor Dom Pedro II. It now 

 contains the most valuable collection of books 

 in South America, and has its own printing and 

 bookbinding shops. Others include the palace 

 of justice, one of the finest buildings in the city 



