Christ the Redeemer

Cosme Velho station is where most people begin their journey up Corcovado mountain, but the railway itself is decades older than the giant statue at the summit.

Back in 1884, Emperor Dom Pedro the Second rode the inaugural train on this narrow rack-and-pinion line. At the time, climbing through the Atlantic forest was purely an elite escape, a way to leave behind the heat and yellow fever outbreaks down at sea level for cool mountain air. By 1910, the line traded steam for electricity, becoming Brazil's first electric passenger railway.

What strikes me is how quickly that Victorian novelty took on a completely different purpose in the 1920s. When the Catholic Church and Brazilian engineers set out to build a colossal concrete monument atop a sheer granite cliff seven hundred and ten meters above the city, they ran into a logistical nightmare. The mountain was surrounded by dense rainforest and had no road to the peak. The only way to move thousands of tons of construction material was this single cog railway.

Between 1926 and 1931, the little electric train transformed into an industrial lifeline. It carried bags of cement, sand, water, massive iron scaffolding, and delicate plaster molds shipped across the ocean from Paris. When we look up at the mountain today, it is clear that without this nineteenth-century imperial railway already running through the jungle, the modern monument simply could not have been built.