The Tijuca Massif

The botanist von Martius arrived in Rio de Janeiro in July 1817, finding the city in full expansion, with water and firewood essential for the city dwellers to establish themselves.

For three centuries, the city was created with the filling of mangroves and swamps, encircled by its hills, and inseparable from the Rio landscape. The move of the Portuguese royal family to Brazil in 1808 caused the city’s population to increase by 15,000 people in a few days.

The abrupt population growth increased the demand for food, water supply, energy (firewood and coal), and timber for construction, exhausting natural resources. All this came from one place: the dense forests of Rio de Janeiro.

In the 19th century, the urban space, then limited to the Morro do Castelo, São Bento, da Conceição, and Santo Antônio, expanded intensely and in a disorderly manner towards the south and north. The Land Law of 1850 was the first initiative for the organization of private property in Brazil.

Urban expansion occupied the flanks and slopes of the Tijuca Massif, either via Laranjeiras and Santa Teresa, or in the swampy areas of Estácio and Tijuca, until it reached the mid-slope in Alto da Boa Vista, where coffee cultivation dominated the landscape and overlapped the original forest.

Coffee seeds arrived in Brazil around 1600, and a second introduction may have occurred in 1727. Some believe that coffee occupied several areas of the city of Rio de Janeiro at the end of the 18th century. The earliest record of its export is from 1808.

Coffee cultivation was the main factor in the destruction of the forests of the Tijuca Massif in the first half of the 1800s. Its cultivation, by felling and burning forests, without safeguarding the soil and its springs, impacted the landscape, biodiversity, and the water supply to the city.

Among the first naturalists to collect plants in the Tijuca Massif, the following stand out: Glaziou, Ule, Schwacke, Burchell, Riedel, Ball, Gardner, Lindman, and Guillemin. The most documented locations were: Corcovado, Tijuca, and Gávea.

The massif, as much as the forest, is a space of history and memory. It shows natural processes of vegetation, as well as those of human agency in response to society’s demands over time. It is a milestone in the recovery of deforested areas in the country.

This is the oldest and most emblematic reforestation initiative in Brazil. Its first administrator, Manoel Gomes Archer, a former coffee grower, held the position for two periods: 1862-1874 and 1890-1891. Besides him, Baron d’Escragnolle and Glaziou also held this role.

Even today, it is possible to find living testimonies of this project in the area, as exemplified by the many individual cedars in lines: counting their growth rings has proven them to be up to 150 years old, and therefore the seedlings planted in the reforestation project.