Arco do Teles
Colonial archway over a narrow lane, said to still echo with a legendary witch's laughter after dark.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Arco do Teles in Rio de Janeiro starts with a fire before dawn on July 20, 1790, when flames swallowed the passage and nearly wiped out the city's archives, and one merchant never made it out. It traces the arch back to the 1740s, when its owner set a shrine to Our Lady of Pleasures on the upper floor, and to the alley's later decades as a strip of taverns and brothels the church eventually gave up on. It follows the legend that grew from there: a Portuguese-born woman named Bárbara dos Prazeres, said to have worked this passage in the 1790s and to have crossed some very dark lines.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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