Ipanema Beach
Crescent of white sand backed by a hand-laid mosaic promenade and borrowed lifeguard numbers.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janeiro starts with an odd detail underfoot: its lifeguard towers pick up mid-count from neighboring Copacabana, numbered from posto seven instead of starting at one. It traces how posto nine became a social address for artists and the LGBTQ community in the 1960s, and how the wave-patterned stone paving was carried down the coast by landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx in the 1970s. Along the way it asks what the beach's own name secretly means in the Tupi language once spoken here.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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