When Europeans first came across Guanabara Bay, they found what appeared to be paradise. Amerigo Vespucci, the chief pilot of the expedition, wrongly believed that the bay was the mouth of a river. It was 1st of January 1502. Hence, the name Rio de Janeiro.

Rio was a place of beaches, hills and mountains, swamps, lagoons and forests. The local tribe, the Tupinambás, long extinct now, lived happily and, to European eyes, amorally. Fruit could be picked from the trees. Life was anything but hard, except for their traditional enemies, the Temiminós tribe. Prisoners of war were the subjects of a Tupinambás speciality: cannibalism. Castro describes these proceedings with so much relish, the omission of the local recipes seems like a serious blunder. The unfortunate victims were warriors, who for the sake of their own pride and that of their tribe, went along with the whole thing, living like kings for a time, marrying a local girl, before the fatal day came. Then the local villages would gather, and the warrior brought into the circle, where he was encouraged to throw rocks and curses at his captors, before being clubbed on the head. His remains were divided up: tough bits smoked above a fire and given to the warriors, viscera, brains and entrails cooked in a pot for the women. The blood went to the children. As Castro points out, it was mostly a symbolic meal since there wouldn’t have been much to go round. Absorbing a powerful enemy and their strength was the important thing.

In spite of this, the Europeans appear to have been charmed by the locals, especially, it has to be said, by the women. So much so that many men over the years would choose life among the Tupinambás over a return to Europe.

Rio is a melting pot of cultural, national and racial influences. The Portuguese had no real interest in the place initially, and the French, who preferred to get the locals on side (the Portuguese used enslavement) won favour with the Tupinambás. It would be an alliance that would last seventy years.

Villegagnon, who took the five-year old Mary Queen of Scots to safety in France, headed a mission in the 1550s to set up a new colony known as Antarctic France. He choose Guanabara Bay. With three ships and 600 men, including a personal retinue from Scotland, he arrived in Rio, where he built a fort, and, with the help of the locals, the beginnings of a city to be named Henriville (after the French king Henri II who authorised the expedition). But the sexual libertarianism of the locals brought chaos among Villegagnon’s men. They were asked to stick to one local woman, marry her under French law, or face execution. The men rebelled, some fleeing to the interior of the bay, or secretly sailing back to France, while others were hung. The effects on morale and order required Villegagnon to send back to France for soldiers, and civilians of both sexes who might populate the area. What he got from his boss, Admiral Coligny, who’d converted to Calvinism, were a bunch of preachers and about 300 dour protestants. Inevitably, religious conflict broke out between Catholics and Calvinists, while outside the walls of the fort, the cannibals continued on happily.

Faced with increasing disorder and an assassination attempt, Villegagnon returned to France to explain things. It was at this point that the Portuguese seized the initiative and sailing down from Bahia, they attacked Fort Coligny and destroyed it. Initially unable to defend their new turf, the Portuguese were forced to leave, but they returned four years later and this time took Guanabara Bay for themselves, razing Henriville to the ground and establishing their own city on 1st March 1565. The City of St Sebastian of Rio de Janeiro. Rio was now part of the Portuguese empire, and would become a major port.

When gold was discovered inland in Minas Gerais just before the eighteenth century, Rio was already transporting many goods back to Europe. Unhappy about the alliance between Portugal and England, the French decided to attack the city. The population successfully defeated them. One of the French Commanders was assassinated while in custody and the French later returned and burned down the city in revenge.

Castro describes these conflicts with a certain degree of humour. But he doesn’t ignore the darker side of the city: the fact that it was a major slave port, or that women were effectively kept under a kind of house arrest for centuries.

When Napoleon decided to have a go at the British, he attacked Lisbon, striking at the old Portuguese-English alliance. The Portuguese answer to this was to pack up the royal court and run for Rio, under naval escort from the British who were delighted at the thought of this longed for market coming within their grasp. The Portuguese colony was now the centre of the Portuguese empire. Palaces sprang up, not to mention the ostentatious fashions of a more temperate Europe, completely out of place in the tropics. Later, Brazil would declare its independence from Portugal.

Meanwhile, the British flooded in. Anti-Bonapartist French also arrived, and later, after Bonaparte’s defeat, his supporters would take refuge in the city. The effects of this immigration had a significant effect upon the city’s infrastructure and leisure. The British dominated the more practical services: transport, sanitation, rubbish collection, street lighting, telegraphy, textile and heavy goods industries, as well as a large section of the wholesale and import business. The French ran coffee plantations, or were artists, tailors and dressmakers, musicians, craftsmen. They brought culture and the arts, and many of the new businesses seem to have been run by women. As a result of this, Carioca women finally emerged from their centuries of seclusion into the streets.

The influence of the city’s black population too cannot be underestimated. Castro believes that while slavery was undoubtedly harsh, in Rio it often amounted to domestic service or work in the streets, as opposed to the kind of plantation labour that occurred elsewhere. It’s not clear whether his picture of things is tinted with rose-coloured spectacles. He pretty much glosses over the nastier details about slavery. But not all blacks were slaves, and many would have a significant part to play in Rio’s history: the black botanists, the sailor who challenged the navy on lashing and led a rebellion, the nineteenth century professional woman pianist and composer, Chiquinha who later founded an organisation to protect the copyright of composers and playwrights and served as its president from its inauguration in 1917 to her death in 1935, aged eighty-eight. The slave trade ended in 1850 under pressure from the British.

Castro does not tell the story of Rio in a simple chronological order. Instead he weaves the modern day and the historical together, moving back and forth. Samba and Carnival get a lot of attention, not to mention ‘The Girl From Ipanema.’ The beach is never far away in this book. Whether it’s Ipanema or Copacabana and the glorious legendary hotel that sprang up there for the rich. We learn about the decay and regeneration of neighbourhoods, particular the administrative area which suffered when the capital moved to Brasilia in 1960. The planning mistakes so common in the twentieth century, where beautiful old buildings were replaced by monstrosities, happened here too. But as we learn, Rio has some fantastic Art Deco architecture along with colonial, baroque and the ubiquitous modern skyscrapers.

Famous Cariocas too get a mention: from Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes to writer Paulo Coelho and architect Oscar Niemeyer.

Something that is rather absent from the book, though, is an account of the effects of the military dictatorship that ran from 1964 to 1985. In Castro’s book, these leaders come across as a bunch of philistine bureaucrats who raze a major building to the ground for what appear to be fairly petty reasons. But in the memoirs of another Rio inhabitant, Caetano Veloso, it’s clear that there was torture in prisons, and by the end of 1968, Brazil was effectively a police state. Castro has virtually nothing to say about this.

Castro’s Rio is one of sexual freedom, samba and sunlit beaches, where twentieth century Carioca women led much freer lives than their counterparts elsewhere, even compared to parts of the industrialized world. The Carioca, used to walking around in bikinis or bermudas thinks nothing of turning up in a restaurant this way. But of course there’s always another side to things. The favelas, for the most part, are left out of the book. The film, “City of God” and its accompanying documentary about life and policing in these shanty towns of poverty, drug-trafficking and gun-toting youngsters are worth a look for anyone interested in how some of the poorest Cariocas live. Caetano Veloso’s memoir, Tropical Truth, mentions Carioca artist Hélio Oiticica who liked to visit Rio’s favelas in the ’sixties, and who “admired figures who seemed to respond with violence to Brazil’s unbelievable social disparities.” Oiticica’s famous banner “Be a criminal. Be a Hero” summed up this attitude. However, such things don’t make it into “Rio: Carnival Under Fire.” Otherwise, Castro’s book is easy to read and full of fascinating and humorous anecdotes. It’s a good introduction to anyone interested in the city, whether as a visitor, an armchair tourist, or a fan of Brazilian culture and music.

Kara Kellar Bell is a film and media graduate from the West of Scotland, with a passion for European novels, French films, silent cinema, and Brazilian music (everything from Daniela Mercury and other pop stars through to bossa nova). As a writer, she likes to have room to move around creatively, so she’s not located in one genre. She writes realism and also stories of a more fantastic nature, usually grounded to some extent in the real world. She also takes delight in writing across the sexual spectrum, and as a bisexual, considers it important to remind people that things are not always black and white, either/or, in sexuality or in gender. For a selection of Kara’s writing on the Showcase section of this site, click here

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.