Place
Station of Santa Teresa trams
R. Lélio Gama, s/n - Centro, Rio de Janeiro - RJ, 20031-080
Historic hillside tramway riding atop an eighteenth-century stone aqueduct on rails over a century old.
This guide to the Santa Teresa tram station in Rio traces the two-hundred-seventy-meter Arcos da Lapa aqueduct from its 1750 completion carrying water into the old city, through its 1896 conversion into Latin America's oldest electric railway. It follows the line's mule-drawn beginnings in 1877 and its darker turn on an August evening in 2011, when a tram's brakes failed on the descent. Notice the narrow, meter-wide gauge, chosen to hug Santa Teresa's tight hillside curves.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.