5 Days in Rio de Janeiro

Start with breakfast in a room that was already a legend when your great-grandparents were young. Portuguese immigrants founded the Confeitaria Colombo in 1894, and its interior, with huge crystal mirrors from Antwerp and carved jacaranda woodwork, was redone in Art Nouveau style between 1912 and 1918. A tea room went upstairs in 1922. It has been the place where Rio's elite ordered cafezinho (a small, strong coffee) and cakes ever since.

It's a tourist stop and priced like one, but a good one. Skip the full lunch, order a cake and a coffee, and look up at the stained-glass ceiling. There's a branch with a sea view inside the Forte de Copacabana, which you'll pass on day three.

A block away, behind a Manueline facade that looks airlifted from Lisbon, is the Real Gabinete Português de Leitura. Forty-three Portuguese immigrants, political refugees, founded the institution in 1837, and the building you see was opened in 1887 by Princess Isabel, with Emperor Pedro II having laid the first stone in 1880. It holds around 350,000 volumes, the largest collection of Portuguese literature outside Portugal, including a first edition of Os Lusíadas from 1572.

You don't need to read Portuguese. Walk in, look up at the reading room with its wrought-iron galleries and the stained-glass skylight, and leave in half an hour. It's one of the best free things in Rio and often empty.

Ten minutes away, the Theatro Municipal faces Cinelândia, the square named after the cinemas that once lined it. Inspired by the Paris Opéra of Charles Garnier, it was inaugurated on 14 July 1909 with 1,739 seats, built on 1,600 timber piles because the ground is so soft. Rio of that era was rebuilding itself as a Belle Époque capital, and this is the building that says so.

The facade is worth the stop on its own. A guided visit takes you through the foyer, the marble staircase and the auditorium. The Biblioteca Nacional and the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes are next door.

Take the VLT or walk to the Church of Our Lady of the Candelária, a grand church that sits in the middle of the financial center like a very large wedding cake. It has also been a stage for modern Brazil: the Diretas Já rally for direct elections gathered here in the 1980s, and in 1993 street children were killed nearby in the Candelária massacre, which Brazilians still bring up when they talk about the city's violence.

Go in for ten minutes, then continue toward Praça XV, where the ferries to Niterói and Paquetá leave.

This is the new Rio. The Orla Conde (everyone still calls it the Boulevard Olímpico) is a 3.5 km waterfront promenade that opened between 2015 and 2017 where the Perimetral elevated highway used to cut the port off from the city. For 252 years part of this shoreline was restricted to the navy. Now there's a long walk along the bay, with Eduardo Kobra's Etnias mural, 2,500 square meters of painted faces from five continents, and the Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR) and the AquaRio close by.

At the end of the quay is the white, skeletal Museu do Amanhã (Museum of Tomorrow), designed by Santiago Calatrava and opened on 17 December 2015. It's a science museum, and an honest verdict is that the building is better than the exhibits. Go for the architecture and the bay view, and walk the pier outside.

Walk inland from the museum to a corner that Rio was slow to talk about. The Cais do Valongo, built in 1811, was where enslaved Africans were landed and sold until 1831. UNESCO made it a World Heritage Site in 2017 because it's the only material trace of the arrival of enslaved Africans in the Americas. The excavation is a few stones in a quiet plaza, so read the panel before you look at the ground.

This part of the port, Saúde and Gamboa, is called Pequena África (Little Africa), and it's where the roots of Rio's samba are usually traced. The next stop is its best living example.

Pedra do Sal, the Rock of Salt, is a stone stairway where enslaved workers unloaded salt from the port and where, later, the community of a quilombo (a settlement founded by people who escaped slavery) lived. The site was listed as a heritage monument by the state in 1984. For decades the greats of samba and choro, Donga, João da Baiana and Pixinguinha among them, played around here, and on Mondays a free roda de samba (an acoustic samba circle) still fills the street from early evening until late at night.

Musicians sit around a table in the middle, the crowd sings every word, vendors sell beer and skewers from carts, and nobody is dressed up. It gets crowded, so hold your phone close, stay in the main crowd and leave by ride-hailing car to the door.

The statue was built between 1922 and 1931 and dedicated on 12 October 1931. It's 30 meters tall, 38 with its pedestal, and 28 meters across the arms. Paul Landowski sculpted it, the engineer Heitor da Silva Costa built it with Albert Caquot's reinforced-concrete design, and the Romanian sculptor Gheorghe Leonida made the face. It's concrete covered in small soapstone tiles, which is also why it's struck by lightning every now and then. It was named one of the New Seven Wonders in 2007.

There are two official ways up and neither is the cheapest, which is the point. The Corcovado train leaves from Cosme Velho station (Rua Cosme Velho 513) and climbs through Tijuca forest, a pleasant, slow ride on the oldest tourist railway in Brazil. The official vans of Paineiras Corcovado leave from the visitor center and from Copacabana and Largo do Machado, and a van ticket includes the monument. Both sell tickets for a chosen date and time, so book on the official sites, not from resellers, and arrive 15 minutes early. The train is more scenic. The van from Copacabana or Largo do Machado is more convenient if you're staying there.

Once there, you share the platform with a lot of phones. Go to the edge of the terrace for the view of Sugarloaf, Guanabara Bay and the lagoon. An honest verdict: the statue is smaller than you think, and the view is the real reason to go.

Come back down to the foot of Corcovado, to the old estate of the Lage family. The park was laid out around 1840 with an artificial grotto and a landscape garden by the English designer John Tyndale, and in the 1920s the industrialist Henrique Lage had the mansion remade for his wife, the opera singer Gabriella Besanzoni. Today the mansion is the Escola de Artes Visuais, a public art school, and a very good place for coffee.

Sit in the courtyard café under the arcades with the forest looking in over the roof, then walk the grotto and the aquarium. A trail to Corcovado starts here too, but skip it: the UK government reports armed robberies on the walking trail to the statue.

Ten minutes' walk toward the lagoon is the Jardim Botânico, founded in 1808 by the Portuguese king John VI to grow spices such as nutmeg and cinnamon, and opened to the public in 1822. About 6,500 species grow on 54 hectares, with Corcovado looming above the trees.

Start at the avenue of imperial palms, then follow the paths to the greenhouses and the lake.

Walk or ride to the Lagoa, the lagoon in the middle of the South Zone, joined to the ocean by a canal in the Jardim de Alah park. The path around it is 7.5 km, flat and paved, and it's how Cariocas exercise at sunset. With 45 minutes, walk the Jardim de Alah side to a lakeside kiosk for a coconut water with Corcovado behind you. Then take an app car to Urca, about 25 minutes.

Avoid the lagoon after dark.

Sugarloaf (Pão de Açúcar) rises 396 meters from the mouth of Guanabara Bay, and the cable car that climbs it opened in 1912, the first in Brazil. It runs in two stages, from the base to Morro da Urca and then to the summit, in glass cars that hold around 65 people. Both viewpoints are good, the summit is better, and the whole city lies in front of you with Christ the Redeemer on the horizon.

Go for sunset, but arrive well before, because the line for the cars is where you spend your time. Be at the base by 4:30pm, enjoy Morro da Urca, then climb on to the summit for the golden hour and stay until the lights come on across Copacabana. The sun sets around 6pm in late October, about 5:15pm in June and 6:40pm in December.

Walk down from the cable car and cross to the little sea wall in Urca, the mureta, where half the neighborhood sits at dusk with a beer and a plate of fried snacks. Bar Urca, on Rua Cândido Gaffrée, is the bar behind the wall, and it spills out on the pavement and the wall opposite. The sea is a few meters away and the lights of Niterói appear across the water.

Order a chope (draft beer) and some fried snacks, and wait for a place on the wall. Urca is a quiet, residential enclave and one of the pleasantest corners of the city at night. Take an app car back.

Copacabana is about 4 km of sand, 30 to 100 meters deep, with Avenida Atlântica behind it and the Copacabana Palace hotel (opened in 1923) in the middle. In the 1970s Roberto Burle Marx guided the redesign of the wave-patterned pavement, and a landfill widened the sand and the avenue. It's also the stage for the huge New Year's Eve fireworks and for free concerts that have drawn well over a million people.

Here is how the beach works. Numbered lifeguard towers called postos (Posto 5, Posto 6) double as addresses: "meet at Posto 6". Each stretch has its own crowd, so walk a bit and settle where the mix suits you. Rent a chair and umbrella from a barraca (a stand on the sand), and expect vendors to walk past all day selling grilled cheese on a stick, iced mate and sarongs. Say não, obrigado once and they move on.

The sea can be rough, with rip currents and heavy surf even on a bright day. Swim near a lifeguard tower, follow the flags, and never go in after drinking.

At the end of the beach, the army fort sits on the rocks of Ponta de Copacabana. It's best known for the 1922 revolt of young army officers, the tenentes, who marched along the sand, an event still remembered in Brazilian politics. Today it holds a military history museum, old cannons and one of the best views of the bay.

The Confeitaria Colombo branch inside, which moved here in 2003, serves a good coffee with the sea in front.

Walk or take the bike path toward Ipanema and have lunch at a table built around Brazil's national dish. Feijoada is a slow-cooked stew of black beans with pork and sausage, served with rice, farofa (toasted cassava flour), collard greens and orange slices to cut the fat. Tradition says Wednesday and Saturday are feijoada days in Rio, and today is a Wednesday if you started on a Monday. Casa da Feijoada, on Rua Prudente de Morais in Ipanema, is a restaurant built for exactly this dish.

Share a pot and don't plan a swim afterwards.

Ipanema is the smaller, more local sister, about 2.6 km long, and it gave the world "The Girl from Ipanema", written in 1962 by Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes. The story says they watched a teenage girl walk past the Veloso café on her way to the beach. That bar is now called Garota de Ipanema.

Find a spot near Posto 9 and watch how the sand sorts itself: families, futevôlei (footvolley, played without hands), frescobol (a paddle game), surfers and groups who have sat in the same place for decades. Rent a chair, order a coconut water and swim in front of a lifeguard tower.

Walk to the rocky point between Ipanema and Copacabana, Arpoador ("harpoon thrower"). Climb the big flat rock with half the neighborhood and watch the sun go down behind the mountains at the far end of Ipanema. When it drops under the horizon, people applaud, a custom that began in the late 1960s.

Sunset is around 5:15pm in winter and 6:40pm in summer, and the rock is full an hour early on clear days. Don't climb down in the dark.

Finish at the bar where the song began. Garota de Ipanema is an easy, open-fronted place with chope and Brazilian bar food, open late. It's touristy and a bit pricey, but pleasant after a long beach day.

For something less themed, walk toward Leblon, where Rua Dias Ferreira is the high-end restaurant row and a traditional bar like Bracarense, on Rua José Linhares, fills with locals.

The bonde (tram) leaves from Carioca station in the center, rattles across the top of the Arcos da Lapa and climbs into Santa Teresa. A 2011 derailment killed six people and stopped the service for four years, and it reopened in stages from 2015. The fare was R$20 for the round trip with reboarding. The lines were still being reopened in 2026 (the Silvestre branch returned in June), and timetables are changing, so check the state's tram channels the day before. Ride to Largo do Guimarães, the heart of the neighborhood.

Santa Teresa is the hill of artists: steep cobbled streets, crumbling mansions, galleries and viewpoints, where Rio's old rich built before they moved to the beach. Largo do Guimarães, with small bars and craft shops, is the village center.

Two places are worth the walk. Chácara do Céu is a house museum with an art collection and a garden over the bay, and the Parque das Ruínas, the shell of a mansion, is a good viewpoint. Walk in daylight, preferably with company, and keep your phone away: visitors are targeted when they stray into quiet side streets.

Santa Teresa does the boteco well, the neighborhood corner bar with a long menu of Brazilian bar food. Bar do Mineiro is a classic of the type, with a feijoada reputation and a crowd of locals on weekend afternoons.

Order a chope and share a couple of plates, cheaper and more local than the beachfront.

Walk down to the border of Santa Teresa and Lapa for the Selarón Steps. In 1990 the Chilean-born artist Jorge Selarón began to renovate the crumbling steps in front of his house, and he never stopped. The staircase has 215 steps and runs about 125 meters, covered in thousands of tiles from dozens of countries, many sent by visitors. He declared the work a tribute to the Brazilian people, and he died in January 2013, found on the steps.

Climb it for the photo, but go while it's busy, not alone late in the afternoon. Phone snatching happens where crowds gather, so photograph quickly and put the phone away.

The Arcos da Lapa, the white arches of the Carioca Aqueduct, were inaugurated in 1750 and are the largest colonial building project in Brazil. They carried water into the city and later carried the tram you rode this morning. Today they are the symbol of Lapa, with the bars underneath. The cone-shaped Catedral Metropolitana, a modern landmark, is a few minutes away.

Look at them from the street below, then watch the tram cross the top. By day this is a normal central neighborhood. After dark it's Rio's nightlife district.

Lapa is the best night out in Rio. Thursday is a good night, and from Thursday to Saturday the streets under the arches fill with open-air samba, vendors selling drinks from coolers and crowds that spill into the road. The classic way to do it is in a casa de samba, a club with a live band, a dance floor and tables. Carioca da Gema, on Avenida Mem de Sá, is one of the best-known, with shows Tuesday to Saturday (Thursday's starts around 9pm); check the program.

Go with others and hold a bag in front of you. Many clubs use a consumption card (comanda) that you carry and pay at the exit. Losing it means a high fee. Go back by app car to the door.

Tijuca is a huge urban forest, and it isn't original jungle. Coffee plantations stripped these slopes in the 19th century and the city's water supply suffered, so the Second Empire replanted the forest. Today it's an Atlantic Forest park with capuchin monkeys, coatis and more than 230 species of animals and birds.

The easy stop is at the Alto da Boa Vista entrance. The Cascatinha Taunay is a waterfall of about 30 m with a stone bridge from 1860 (swimming isn't allowed), and the pink Capela Mayrink, from 1855, holds replicas of Portinari's murals. Both are a short walk, free and easy for any fitness level.

If you're fit and the sky is clear, hike up the Pico da Tijuca, at 1,021 meters the park's highest point. The trail climbs through forest in about one to two hours, depending on pace and start, and ends with a stairway of 117 steps cut into the rock and a 360-degree view over the bay, the lagoon and the city. Go with a guide or a group: the park is generally safe, but some areas border favelas and the phone signal is poor.

Start early so you're down by lunch, carry plenty of water and wear shoes with grip. If it's clouded in, skip the peak: you'll see nothing from the top.

Brazilian football lives in the Maracanã. It opened in 1950 for the World Cup, and the final, on 16 July 1950, produced the Maracanazo: Brazil lost 2-1 to Uruguay in front of 173,850 people, a record attendance that still stands, and the country went quiet. Today it's home to Flamengo and Fluminense, two of the city's biggest clubs.

The tour goes through the dressing rooms, the press room and the tunnel to the pitch, and the museum has shirts and trophies. If a match is on, go to the match instead, but buy tickets from the club or the official seller, avoid touts and ask your hotel which sector is safest.

Back in Copacabana, have a casual dinner at Cervantes, a Leme institution on Avenida Prado Júnior, known for pork sandwiches with pineapple. Expect a queue at peak hours; it stays open late.

If you'd rather have a proper steak dinner, a churrascaria with rodízio service, where waiters bring skewers to the table until you turn your card over, is the classic final-night meal. Book ahead and go hungry.

End the trip in a tiny bar. Bip Bip, on a side street near Posto 6, has a few tables and a lot of instruments, and musicians play choro and samba in a circle with the audience at the same table when a roda is on. There's no stage and nothing built for tourists.

It's a short drive from dinner, so go by app and order a beer. Keep your phone away and listen for the cavaquinho, the small four-string guitar of samba.