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Hotels
in Rio de Janeiro,Brazil
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Nearly
five hundred years have seen RIO DE JANEIRO
transformed from a fortified outpost on
the rim of an unknown continent into one
of the world's great cities. Its recorded
past is tied exclusively to the legacy of
the colonialism on which it was founded.
No lasting vestige survives of the civilization
of the Tamoios people, who inhabited the
land before the Portuguese arrived.
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The
city's history effectively begins on January 1,
1502, when a Portuguese captain, André Gonçalves,
steered his craft into Guanabara Bay, thinking
he was heading into the mouth of a great river.
The city takes its name from this event - Rio
de Janeiro means the "River of January". In 1555,
the French, keen to stake a claim on the New World,
established a garrison near the Sugar Loaf mountain,
and the Governor General of Brazil, Mem de Sá,
made an unsuccessful attempt to oust them. It
was left to his son, Estácio de Sá, finally to
defeat them in 1567, though he fell - mortally
wounded - during the battle. The city then acquired
its official name, São Sebastião de Rio de Janeiro,
after the infant king of Portugal, and Rio began
to develop on and around the Morro do Castelo
- in front of where Santos Dumont airport now
stands. With Bahia the centre of the new Portuguese
colony, initial progress in Rio was slow, and
only in the 1690s, when gold was discovered in
the neighbouring state of Minas Gerais, did the
city's fortunes look up, as it became the control
and taxation centre for the gold trade. During
the seventeenth century the sugar cane economy
brought new wealth to Rio, but despite being a
prosperous entrepôt, the city remained poorly
developed. For the most part it comprised a collection
of narrow streets and alleys, cramped and dirty,
bordered by habitations built from lath and mud.
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However,
Rio's strategic importance grew as a result
of the struggle with the Spanish over territories
to the south (which would become Uruguay),
and in 1763 the city replaced Bahia (Salvador)
as Brazil's capital city. By the eighteenth
century, the majority of Rio's inhabitants
were African slaves. Unlike other foreign
colonies, in Brazil miscegenation became
the rule rather than the exception: even
the Catholic Church tolerated procreation
between the races, on the grounds that it
supplied more souls to be saved. As a result,
virtually nothing in Rio remained untouched
by African customs, beliefs and behaviour
- a state of affairs that clearly influences
today's city, too, with its mixture of Afro-Brazilian
music, spiritualist cults and cuisine.
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