Botafogo Bay from Sugarloaf Mountain, Rio de Janeiro, 1960s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Botafogo Bay from Sugarloaf Mountain, Rio de Janeiro, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

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Botafogo Bay from Sugarloaf Mountain, Rio de Janeiro, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1960–1969

AA-2026-9AAA80

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Someone climbed partway up Sugarloaf in the 1960s, framed the shot through a fringe of scrub grass, and got a bay full of sailboats for the trouble. Rio's harbor authorities had by then given up trying to keep the water purely commercial, and small pleasure boats were allowed to bob at anchor wherever the wealthy could afford a mooring fee.

The apartment blocks lining the shore were new money's answer to old hills, built fast and built tall on the theory that a view of the bay was worth stacking families twelve stories into the air. Behind them the mountains do the one thing Rio's real estate developers never managed: they stay exactly where they are, indifferent to zoning.

Whoever held the camera was almost certainly a tourist working the cable car circuit, pausing on the way up to prove they had, in fact, gone all the way to the top. The photograph exists because climbing partway up a mountain and stopping to admire the view halfway is, and always has been, socially acceptable.

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