Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Hotels, Vacations, Tourism

Nearly five hundred years have seen RIO DE JANEIRO transformed from a fortified outpost on the rim of an unknown continent into one of the world’s great cities. Its recorded past is tied exclusively to the legacy of the colonialism on which it was founded. No lasting vestige survives of the civilization of the Tamoios people, who inhabited the land before the Portuguese arrived, and the city’s history effectively begins on January 1, 1502, when a Portuguese captain, André Gonçalves, steered his craft into Guanabara Bay, thinking he was heading into the mouth of a great river. The city … more »