Christ the Redeemer

Address

Christ the Redeemer

GPS

-22.9519173, -43.2104585

Address

Christ the Redeemer

GPS

-22.9519173, -43.2104585

How to get there

By Train
Between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m., the Corcovado Train (Trem do Corcovado) departs from Corcovado Station every 30 minutes.

You can take public transportation to Corcovado Station, or you can hail an Uber/taxi.

The station is in the somewhat remote Cosmo Velho neighbourhood. You can get there by direct bus or by taking the metro to the Largo do Machado station and then walking the 2.5 km.

You may get there by taking either Line 580 from Largo do Machado, Line 570 from Leblon, Line 583 from Ipanema, or Line 584 from Copacabana.

By van

Vans run every half hour between Copacabana’s Largo do Machado and Praca do Lido. The vehicles are slightly less expensive, although they frequently reach capacity.

Hiking

Christ the Redeemer can also be reached by foot. The ascent is hard for the faint of heart, taking roughly 3 hours in the summer. The price is R$21 during the shoulder season and R$31 during the peak. The tour begins at Parque Lage.

Price range

$

Standing at the 2,310-foot (705 meters) height, 125 ft (38 meters) tall Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro has captivated scholars and tourists for nearly a century.

Two of Rio's Best: Christ the Redeemer & Sugarloaf Mountain Half-Day TourFor good reason, this landmark should be included in any trip to Rio or free tour of the city. It’s the largest Art Deco-style sculpture in the world, and in 2007 it was named one of the New Seven Wonders of the World with Machu Picchu, the Great Wall of China, and the Roman Colosseum. It’s also the fourth-largest statue of Jesus Christ in the world.

The monument, located atop Rio’s Mount Corcovado, is an impressive 98 feet (30 metres) in height (making it two-thirds the height of New York’s monument of Liberty) and 92 feet (28 metres) in width (when its arms are extended).

The statue is not just Rio’s most famous sight, but also a symbol of Brazil’s national identity. However, the statue’s prominence as a worldwide icon of Christianity draws millions of visitors, both believers and non-believers, to the peak of Mount Corcovado each year.

History of Christ the Redeemer

A local priest in the 1850s proposed building a gigantic statue of Jesus Christ atop Rio’s Mount Corcovado as a Christian monument. After a Declaration of the Republic was declared in Brazil in 1889 – a watershed moment as it separated the church from the state in the country – the idea was scrapped. He had apparently asked Princess Isabel, daughter of Emperor Pedro II and Princess Regent of Brazil at the time, to fund the project.

Private Tour: Rio City Essentials including Christ the Redeemer and Sugar LoafThey wanted to rebel against what they saw as a “increasing godlessness” in the country by placing a massive statue of Jesus on top of a mountain in Rio, and this concern didn’t arise until after World War I, when the Roman Catholic archdiocese in Rio and a group of locals began to worry about the “lack of religious faith” in the Brazilian community. It was desired that the statue be installed atop Mount Corcovado so that it could be seen from all of Rio and serve as a symbol of “reclaiming Rio” (then the capital of Brazil) for Christianity.

At first, the monument was envisioned as Jesus holding a cross in one hand and a globe in the other; the concept for the statue to “face the rising sun” from the peak of the mountain came from Brazilian engineer Heitor da Silva Costa. At some point, however, da Silva Costa changed his thoughts and opted to create the statue as the enormous Art Deco-style statue that is seen out today, with Jesus Christ stretching out his arms wide to welcome the residents of Rio with open arms (quite literally).

Christ the Redeemer by Van and Selarón StepsSculptor Paul Landowski (French-Polish) spent years designing the statue in clay pieces that were later shipped to Brazil and remade with concrete; Roman artist Gheorghe Leonida was responsible for the statue’s face.

Anyone who sees the statue for the first time is likely to wonder, “How the hell did the statue get up there in the first place?” Mount Corcovado is an extraordinarily tall mountain, as anyone who has climbed it on their own or on a free walking tour will attest.

All the necessary materials (and the workers) were brought up the mountain on a small cog-wheel train; (which at the time was mainly used to take tourists to the top of the mountain to see the vistas) due to the statue’s massive size.

During the building phase, workers used long wooden poles as scaffolding, and they actually had to scale them in order to put all the materials in the right place, which is a task that must have been truly daunting in every sense of the word, but nonetheless represented the locals’ intense religious faith.

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