Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon
Urban lagoon ringed by hills, once a colonial sugar-mill shoreline, now a running and paddling track.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon in Rio de Janeiro opens with the Tamoio people who fished its shallows around 1575 and Governor Antonio Salema's push to build a sugar mill in their place. It follows the water through a change of hands to a widow named Petronilha Fagundes and a young officer, Rodrigo de Freitas, who married in 1702 and later sailed home to Portugal. The lagoon then carried the city's growth into the twentieth century, when its shoreline began absorbing far more than anyone standing at the water's edge today would guess.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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