Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
AA-2026-790378
On the image
The trees in this photograph are doing something trees rarely get asked to do: proving a point. Rio's Aterro do Flamengo was reclaimed from the bay only a few years before this frame was taken, an entire park built on landfill and the confident postwar belief that a city could simply manufacture more ground when it ran short. Rows of newly planted saplings, still small enough to photograph whole, stand as evidence that the planners meant it.
Beneath them a scatter of Volkswagen Beetles sits parked in the dappled shade, the default vehicle of a decade that had decided uniformity was efficiency. Their owners have wandered off toward the view, leaving the cars to hold the ground the way cars do, patiently and pointlessly, while a bus rounds the curve behind them on business of its own.
Above the treeline the bell tower of the Glória Church still commands the hill the way it has since long before anyone thought to landscape the water below it, a reminder that the skyline's oldest resident outranks every high-rise crowding in around it. The new park was meant to modernise the waterfront; instead it mostly framed, more handsomely than before, the old church that had never needed the help.
The historian's note
The scene shows the Aterro do Flamengo, a landfill park constructed along Rio de Janeiro's Guanabara Bay shoreline and completed in 1965 under the landscape design of Roberto Burle Marx. The project reclaimed roughly 1.2 million square metres from the bay to link several southern zone neighbourhoods with continuous green space, replacing what had been rail yards and shoreline clutter.
The domed bell tower visible on the hill is the Igreja de Nossa Senhora da Glória do Outeiro, an eighteenth-century colonial church that predates virtually every other structure in the frame and remains a fixed reference point on the Rio skyline. Its position atop the outcrop known as the Outeiro da Glória has made it a landmark visible from the bay and the park alike since long before the surrounding land existed as dry ground.
The Volkswagen Beetles parked beneath the young trees reflect the car's dominance of the Brazilian market in this period, following the establishment of Volkswagen do Brasil manufacturing in the 1950s. The recently planted trees, still modest in height, mark the park in its first years of maturity rather than its later, denser form.
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Parque do Flamengo and Glória Church, Rio de Janeiro, 1960s. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-790378. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/parque-do-flamengo-and-gl-ria-church-rio-de-janeiro-1960s.
@misc{aaAA2026790378,
title = {Parque do Flamengo and Glória Church, Rio de Janeiro, 1960s},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-790378},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/parque-do-flamengo-and-gl-ria-church-rio-de-janeiro-1960s}
}TY - ART TI - Parque do Flamengo and Glória Church, Rio de Janeiro, 1960s PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-790378 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/parque-do-flamengo-and-gl-ria-church-rio-de-janeiro-1960s ER -
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