| BRASIL - December 2003 |
| Claire Rosemary Jane, Children's Author |
| Visit to Brazil |
| homepage Index page Londrina University Rio de Janeiro Christmas Day in Rio de Janeiro Corcovado Travelling around Rio Iguacu Falls Sao Francisco Enseada Pousada Da Ilha El Misti Carima Hotel Currency. |
| Corcovado, The Statue of Christ the Redeemer, is one of the first things you often see in any film footage of Rio de Janeiro. Small wonder, for it is truly massive! It was certainly number two on my list of places to visit in Rio, (with Pao de Acucar being number one.) From here, quite apart from going to see the mighty monument close up, you get views across the city of Rio de Janeiro which are truly spectacular. You can get just a little taste of this by looking at the photograph on the Rio de Janeiro web page, with its view across Baia de Guanamara, Rio's huge natural harbour. From here too you can see the Atlantic Ocean, with its Copacabana and Ipanema beaches, and also get a graphic illustration as to just how close some of the Favelas are to the upmarket hotels. As for the Statue itself, it is 710 metres above sea level, was designed by a Brazilian named Heitor da Silva Costa, was completed in 1931, is 38 metres high, weighs 1145 tons, spans 30 metres between the finger tips, is floodlit at night, and was first floodlit by the well known Engineer, Guglielmo Marconi, (who incidentally is considered to be the pioneer of the wireless, which means just what the word suggests, a means of communication without wires.) A lesser known fact is that there is a chapel in its base, capable of taking about 150 people. My main website is at: http://clairerosemaryjane.co.uk |
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| Corcovado |
| BELOW At Corcovado on December 27th, 2003. These two views, one of the front and one of the back, help to illustrate the size of the structure. |
| Photographs Copyright Claire Rosemary Jane, not to be used without permission. |
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| LEFT Photographed in front of the statue by Billy and Nicola, whom I met here, and whom I discovered were from Daventry in Northamptonshire (UK!) I am standing in front of the monument. With it being such a stunningly beautiful day, Corcovado was jam packed with people and it was virtually impossible to get a photograph without a few other people in it! |
| RIGHT A view of the back of the statue which helps to illustrate its massiveness, and how it tops the mountain on which it was built. As Corcovado (which is the mountain) itself is granite, it is almost certainly a volcanic plug, its very shape suggests this, as does that of Rio's other major mountain attraction, Pao de Acucar. |