A place to look out from
Mirante comes from mirar, to gaze. It’s the high point from which you take in the landscape — and Rio, squeezed between mountains and sea, has always been a city of lookouts. By the late 19th century the top of Corcovado already had a covered viewpoint, the Chapéu do Sol (“sun hat”), long before the statue of Christ existed.
In 1903, Mayor Pereira Passos built the Vista Chinesa in the Alto da Boa Vista hills: a pavilion of mortar made to look like bamboo, honoring the Chinese workers brought over in the early 19th century to grow tea near today’s Botanical Garden. From there you see Corcovado, the Lagoon and Sugarloaf all at once.
The view from here
From Mirante’s terrace, the horizon belongs to Corcovado, 710 meters high, with Christ the Redeemer on top — about 2.4 km away as the crow flies, to the southwest. All the green around it is part of Tijuca National Park.
A forest planted by hand
That forest looks untouched, but almost all of it was replanted. In the 19th century the slopes were cleared for coffee and sugarcane; without the forest the springs dried up, and the imperial capital began to run short of water.
From 1862, on the orders of Emperor Pedro II, Major Manuel Gomes Archer led the reforestation, carried out by enslaved workers: some 100,000 seedlings, mostly native Atlantic Forest species, planted over thirteen years. Later the Baron d’Escragnolle turned the area into a park, with paths, fountains and ponds.
In 1961 the protected forests were joined into Tijuca National Park — today one of the largest urban forests in the world and Brazil’s most visited national park.
A landscape that is heritage
In 2012, UNESCO inscribed “Rio de Janeiro: Carioca Landscapes between the Mountain and the Sea” on the World Heritage List — the first urban landscape to be recognized this way. It includes Corcovado, the Tijuca Forest, Sugarloaf Mountain, the entrance to Guanabara Bay and the Copacabana waterfront: many of the places our rooms are named after.
Music & bohemian life
The city in song
Few cities have been sung about so much from above. In 1934, Aurora Miranda and André Filho recorded the march “Cidade Maravilhosa” (Marvelous City), which he wrote for the 1935 Carnival. The song immortalized Rio’s nickname and was later adopted as the city’s official anthem.
In 1962, Tom Jobim wrote “Samba do Avião” (The Airplane Samba), about the thrill of arriving in Rio by air and seeing Christ the Redeemer and the bay from above before landing at Galeão — the same landscape that unfolds from our terrace, only with your feet on the ground.