Convento de Santo Antônio

This guide to Convento de Santo Antônio in Rio de Janeiro opens with a riddle: an entire hill once stood beneath this Franciscan convent, and the hill is gone while the convent remains. It traces back to 1607, when a Portuguese governor granted Franciscan friars the hill and its quarries, and how they carved the convent's own foundation walls from that rock starting in 1608. Along the way it visits the eighteenth-century sacristy's carved jacaranda cabinets and the table linked to Brazil's 1822 independence declaration.