Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon

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.