Pão de Açúcar from above, feijoada completa on a Saturday at Bar do Mineiro, and a caipirinha at sunset on Ipanema
Rio de Janeiro is the city where geography is the entire argument — mountains rising directly from the sea, a bay the Portuguese mistook for a river mouth, forests covering the hillsides in the middle of 7 million people. The food culture is Carioca: deeply social, resolutely unpretentious, organised around botequins (informal neighbourhood bars that have served the same food since the 1940s), and anchored to Saturday feijoada — black beans slow-cooked for hours with every cut of salted pork (dried beef, smoked sausage, pork ears, trotter, tail), served with orange slices to cut the fat, faro…
Rio de Janeiro was founded in 1565 by Portuguese colonists at the mouth of Guanabara Bay — a strategic port to control sugar trade and resist French incursions. It became the capital of colonial Brazil in 1763. The truly extraordinary moment came in 1808: Napoleon's invasion of Portugal caused the entire Portuguese royal court — 10,000 people, the entire government apparatus, the treasury, the royal library, even the printing presses — to evacuate to Rio, making it the only American city to have ever served as the seat of a European monarchy. Dom João VI opened the ports of Brazil to free tra…