Rio: Porto and Little Africa

In the middle of Rio's port area, there is an open archaeological pit cut into the street, revealing two distinct layers of stone. The lower pavement looks rough and irregular, pieced together from dark cobblestones. The upper layer is flatter and far more orderly. What you are looking at is an imperial attempt to pave right over an uncomfortable truth.

Colonial authorities built the original Valongo Wharf in 1811. Before that, slave ships unloaded captive Africans right in the centre of the city, in plain view of daily business. The city elite found that sight disturbing, not because they opposed slavery, but because they disliked having it on their doorstep. So they pushed the entire operation out here to the port fringes, turning Valongo into the main point of arrival. Over the following decades, hundreds of thousands of captive men, women, and children took their first steps on Brazilian soil across these lower, uneven stones.

Then, in 1843, Brazil prepared for a royal wedding. Emperor Pedro II was marrying Princess Teresa Cristina of the Two Sicilies, and she was arriving by ship. City officials decided that welcoming a future empress at an infamous slave wharf simply would not do. Their solution was remarkably direct: they paved over the old quay with refined, dressed stone, renamed it the Empress Wharf, and treated the past as solved.