Station of Santa Teresa trams
Historic hillside tramway riding atop an eighteenth-century stone aqueduct on rails over a century old.
Location
About this audio guide
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.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Santa Teresa
Hillside artists' quarter reached by a century-old tram crossing a repurposed colonial aqueduct.
Arcos da Lapa
Colonial stone aqueduct turned tram viaduct, its forty-two arches shading Rio's bohemian quarter.
Largo dos Guimarães
Cobblestone hillside square where a century-old tram now turns around beside bars and craft shops.
Sugarloaf Mountain
Granite peak reached by a century-old cable car, with a sweeping panorama over the bay and city.
Teleférico do Alemão
Rusting hillside gondola line of six stations, shut down since two thousand sixteen amid corruption scandal.
Parque das Ruínas
Brick ruins of a Belle Époque mansion, now a hilltop art gallery, theater, and open-air concert venue.