Praça Mauá

The ground beneath our feet here was once open water. A century ago, if you walked down to this part of Rio, you would have found the muddy curve of Prainha, a colonial beach where small boats dragged themselves ashore.

That changed in the early 1900s, when Mayor Pereira Passos and President Rodrigues Alves decided Rio needed to look like a modern European capital. Their plan was vast and uncompromising. They dumped roughly one and a half million square meters of landfill directly into Guanabara Bay, burying the old shoreline and carving out a deep-water commercial port linked to the newly carved Avenida Central.

At the center of this manufactured ground stands a bronze figure perched high on an eight-meter granite column. That is Irineu Evangelista de Sousa, better known as the Baron of Mauá. In the nineteenth century, he almost single-handedly tried to jump-start Brazilian industry. He financed railways, introduced gas street lighting, established shipyards, and strung undersea telegraph cables, often clashing with an imperial court still comfortably tied to an agrarian, slave-based economy. Mauá eventually went bankrupt, but two decades after his death, Rio's engineering elite decided his vision belonged right at the gateway to the Atlantic. Sculptor Rodolfo Bernardelli cast him in bronze, and the monument was dedicated in 1910.

Even Mauá's statue had to yield to modern engineering eventually. When the square underwent its massive redevelopment, workers unbolted the Baron in 2011 and tucked him into storage. He spent four years waiting out the jackhammers before returning to his perch in 2015, looking out over twenty-five thousand square meters of pedestrian stone where colonial fishermen once hauled in their nets.