Augusto Ivan de Freitas Pinheiro and Eliane Canedo
Research and contributions: Cristiane Titoneli
Church and Stone: territory of devotion
The Morro da Conceição hill was named after the first building on its crest, constructed in 1634. This chapel was designed by the widow Maria Dantas as a tribute to the saint to which she was devoted, when she inherited this land. In 1655, she donated the chapel and the surrounding land to the Carmelite Order, where a monastery was to be built. However, the Carmelites transferred the land to French Capuchin monks, who started work on the project that was to become the Palácio Episcopal palace, several decades later.
Behind the Episcopal Palace, relics of the primitive Fortaleza de Nossa Senhora da Conceição fortress may still be seen, whose construction began in 1713, two years after Rio de Janeiro was occupied by French corsairs. Used as an arsenal, a barracks, a war materiel storage facility, and administration offices, the colonial structure of this fortress is preserved, together with the Episcopal Palace, and today houses the Map Museum run by the Army Geographical Service.
The top of this hill also holds the Observatório do Valongo, an observatory that was built in 1881 for the Polytechnic School at the University of Brazil. Today, it is used as a researcher training support center and hosts the Astronomy course offered by the Rio de Janeiro Federal University (UFRJ). The slope facing the downtown area is home to one of the landmark features of the urban restructuring plan implemented by Mayor Pereira Passos that modernized the Docklands: the Jardim Suspenso do Valongo. Inaugurated in 1906, these hanging gardens were designed by landscape artist Luis Rey and follow the same lines as romantic English gardens.
An integral part of the Saúde district, the Morro da Conceição hill is flanked by monuments and two-story townhouses built in the Portuguese style and vibrant with the heritage of its African-Brazilian culture, particularly in the area around the Pedra do Sal rock and the Largo João da Bahiana square. During the early XIX century, some of the earliest settlers on these slopes facing the Guanabara Bay were Portuguese colonizers, attracted by the possibility of jobs on the wharf, with access through the Largo São Francisco da Prainha square.
Between 1850 and 1920, the outlying areas around the hill were settled by manumitted tenement dwellers forced out of cramped communal housing by the government, together with runaway slaves. Benefiting from a significant increase in the number of ‘town slaves’ working in homes and streets from 1808 onwards, many runaway slaves escaping from rural areas blended in with noisy crowds filling the downtown streets. They became almost invisible, as it was hard to distinguish free men from captive, manumitted, and runaway slaves.
Many of these runaways were welcomed by this community, where a supportive network allowed many different ethnicities to live together harmoniously. The presence of West Africans with nago roots played a significant role in the development of street culture in Rio de Janeiro. According to historian Carlos Eugênio Líbano Soares,14 this tradition had the strongest influence on the formation of what became known as Little Africa, together with the Central and West African legacies reaching back to Angola and the Congo. But many other nations lived in the Docklands region as well, viewed and experienced by Africans as a possibility for recreating their homelands.
Do you like Africa? Then go to the market next to the port, in the morning. There she is, seated, squatting, curvaceous and chatty, with her cashmere turban or dressed in rags, trailing laces or rags. This is a strange and curious gallery where grace and grotesque blend. Under their awnings, the Cã people. There are also peddlers, black women, local matrons, patricians of mangoes and bananas, with their rosaries of keys. These lady traders have their own slaves who arrange their wares, supervise, sell or place their huge baskets on busy street corners, tempting the curiosity of passers-by (…) Known as quitandeiras, these second-class costermongers have no more than a stool and canopied board on a stand when the sun is high. Some are charming, in their turbans and floating shawls, their gleaming teeth, lively but deep eyes, lithe and lissome figures, a searching gaze and dragging sandals. Grace, indolence and sometimes the posture of a queen: this is what is found in these daughters of Bahia and Minas Gerais States. More Asian than African in type.15
The main access route leading to the Morro da Conceição hillside community was along a smooth and slippery rock formation at the foot of the hill, where an eye-catching narrow stairway had been carved roughly into the rock by enslaved workers. Once known as the Butt-Buster (Quebra-Bunda), it was later called the Pedra da Prainha and is today the Pedra do Sal rock. This became one of the greatest symbols of Black culture, a landmark enshrined as a centuries-old witness to the African spirit in Brazil.
As settlement began in this region, this rock formation served as a barrier, offering protection against high tides in the Guanabara Bay. Some of the older residents attributed its name – Pedra do Sal – to the high salinity of seawater in the bay in earlier times. They said that after the rock was covered by water at high tide, it dried in the sun, leaving a crust of salt. Other stories are different: as this rock was once on the shoreline, at the site of the wooden jetty where bags of salt were offloaded.
However, this was a gateway not only for salt, but also a wide variety of food staples, shipped into the city from the rear of the bay. During the sugar boom, it also exported the main product driving the Brazilian economy at that time.
Regardless of disagreements over the origin of its name, the fact is that the Pedra do Sal rock is endowed with unique importance, as a physical witness to a not-so-remote past filled with mourning and the resilience of the customs and beliefs of African-Brazilians. Today, it is listed among the city’s cultural heritage assets.
