Santa Teresa

The tram carrying you into Santa Teresa in Rio de Janeiro runs across stone arches built starting in 1718 for an entirely different purpose, and this guide follows that structure from its origins as a colonial aqueduct solving the city's freshwater problem to the day modern plumbing made it obsolete. Rather than tear it down, workers laid tram rails across the top of the old water channel in 1896. Wealthy families had already fled up this same hill decades earlier, escaping a yellow fever epidemic that spared the higher ground.