Tijuca Forest

Born from an urgent ecological rescue mission in 1861, Tijuca Forest stands as a triumphant testament to 19th-century rewilding. When decades of slash-and-burn coffee cultivation devastated the surrounding massifs and choked Rio de Janeiro’s freshwater supply, Emperor Dom Pedro II commissioned Major Manuel Gomes Archer to replant the mountains. Over thirteen years, Archer and a small team of enslaved laborers hand-planted more than 100,000 native Atlantic Forest saplings alongside exotic flora. Nestled amid this reclaimed wilderness sits the pastel-pink Capela Mayrink, an 1855 chapel that once housed original altar paintings by Brazilian modernist Candido Portinari, located just downstream from the foaming 30-meter cascade of the stone-arched Taunay Waterfall. Breathing in the damp, moss-scented air, visitors exchange the sultry coastal heat for a shadowed microclimate dense with climbing lianas, giant bromeliads, and ironwood trees. Sunlight pierces the emerald canopy in fractured beams, illuminating electric-blue morpho butterflies while the guttural calls of howler monkeys echo off sheer gneiss cliffs. The ascent to the 1,021-meter summit of Pico da Tijuca culminates at a 120-step staircase chiseled directly into the exposed granite rockface—hewn in 1920 for the visiting King Albert I of Belgium—rewarding hikers with an exhilarating vertigo, suspended between primeval mountain jungle and the sprawl of Guanabara Bay far below.