Praia do Flamengo

This guide to Praia do Flamengo in Rio de Janeiro is about the park behind the beach and the woman who forced it into being: Lota de Macedo Soares, given no formal training but put in charge of the shoreline in 1961, who insisted it become the largest seaside park in the world rather than another highway. Newspapers of the day called her authoritarian, and she is said to have clashed as fiercely with the landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx, whom she herself hired, as with the engineers who wanted highways before gardens.