Copacabana Beach

This guide to Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro follows the stonemasons hand-laying its wave-patterned promenade and the artist behind it, Roberto Burle Marx, who trained as a painter before the city handed him this stretch of coastline in 1970. It traces the pattern back to a black-and-white paving style from Lisbon, first laid by Portuguese prisoners at the Castelo de São Jorge more than a century earlier. Burle Marx alternated black basalt with white limestone, in waves that echo the surf beside them.