A personal selection of photographs with their stories.
381: Guanabara Bay
When Portuguese explorers arrived in Guanabara Bay on the first day of 1502, they initially were thinking that they had arrived at the mouth of a big river, as the story goes. But another plausible explanation for the name Rio de Janeiro is gaining support: the word for ‘sound’ and ‘bay’ at the time of the discovery was ‘ria’. January Sound, or January Bay. Soon Ria de Janeiro became Rio de Janeiro, in order to avoid confusion between the words ‘Ria’ and ‘Rio’. The bay itself gained the name Guanabara, after the indigenous Tupi word ‘goanã-pará’, which means ‘bosom of the sea’. In the photograph, the skyline of the districts Flamengo and Botafogo is visible, as well as the mountains in the Tijuca Forest and the Corcovado peak, with the statue of Cristo Redentor (Christ the Redeemer) on the top. At the time of the photography, an airplane flew over; most probably, it had taken off only moments earlier from Santos Dumont Airport, which is located on an artificial island in Guanabara Bay.
© Adriano Antoine Robbesom 2012, 2017
Adriano Antoine 