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Urbanising rainforests: emergent socioecologies in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Article  in  Landscape History · July 2016
DOI: 10.1080/01433768.2016.1249724
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Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro
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Landscape History
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Urbanising rainforests: emergent socioecologies in
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Diogo de Carvalho Cabral, Alexandro Solórzano & Rogério Ribeiro de Oliveira
To cite this article: Diogo de Carvalho Cabral, Alexandro Solórzano & Rogério Ribeiro de
Oliveira (2016) Urbanising rainforests: emergent socioecologies in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,
Landscape History, 37:2, 57-78, DOI: 10.1080/01433768.2016.1249724
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DOI: 10.1080/01433768.2016.1249724
Urbanising rainforests: emergent socio-
ecologies in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Diogo de Carvalho Cabral *, Alexandro Solórzano** 
and Rogério Ribeiro de Oliveira***
*Department of Geography, Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; 
diogo.cabral@ibge.gov.br;
**Department of Geography and the Environment, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro; 
alexandrosol@gmail.com
***Department of Geography and the Environment, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro;
rro@puc-rio.br
ABSTRACT
Recently included on the UNESCO World Heritage list, 
the urban forests of Rio de Janeiro are one of the most 
thorough expressions of the more-than-human character 
of the so-called ‘cultural landscapes’. Far from pristine 
nature, Rio’s forests are plant communities that developed 
on land previously used for agriculture, energyand water 
supply, and human habitation, among other purposes. 
Traces of such activities can still be seen in every corner of 
these forests, currently protected areas. Some of the human 
marks are very conspicuous and can be noticed by anyone: 
water tanks, stairways, arches, banana plantations, and the 
like. But some other traces are so organically integrated in 
the landscape that only a trained eye can discern them; for 
example, whole sections of forest dominated by jackfruit, 
an Asian species, and small plateaus carved into the hillside 
with a strangely blackened soil. In this article, we investigate 
the origins of these two kinds of landscape features. Based 
on primary written sources and iconography, in addition 
to the relevant historiography, this work of historical 
reconstruction reveals an inextricable interpenetration 
between socio-economic and cultural processes — such 
as cash crop expansion and urban sprawl — on the one 
hand and bio-ecological processes — such as secondary 
succession and ecosystem invasion — on the other. In fact, 
as we argue, both are part of the same moving life-world, 
a continuous web of more-than-human relationships that 
generates both city and forest. This socionatural dialectic 
is responsible for Rio de Janeiro currently being a city full 
of forests which, if carefully inspected, reveal themselves 
full of urban history.
keywords 
Tropical forests, Rio de Janeiro, urbanisation, 
urban parks, environmental history
INTRODUCTION
While their scientific thought inevitably absorbs 
much of the surrounding social environment 
(Worster 1994), ecologists have always been in 
trouble in explicitly incorporating human action 
into their theories. Usually considering Homo 
sapiens as external from its ecosystem (O’Neill 
2001), ecologists and other environmental 
scientists tend to oscillate between an ecocentric 
position that frames humans and their activities 
as disturbing wild environments (e.g. Foster et al. 
1998; MacDougall et al. 2013; Murphy & Romanuk 
2014), and a technocentric position that stresses 
human growing capacity for domesticating, 
engineering, and dominating ecological systems 
58 landscape history
(e.g. Smith 2007; Ellis 2011; Ellis et al. 2013). 
Although these two approaches certainly reveal 
important aspects of the real world, they cannot 
by themselves provide a satisfactory account of 
the historical formation of human-inhabited 
Earth, especially when one considers local-
scale details. One can argue that, no matter 
how clumsy and destructive, the human career 
in the biosphere is not appropriately described 
as a foreign damaging interference nor as a 
domination exerted from the outside; from the 
point of view of their own ecological constitution, 
humans are ‘partners in a conversation with a 
larger world, both animate and inanimate, about 
the possibilities of existence’ (Nash 2005, p. 69). 
Simply put, mainstream ecological narratives say 
a lot about how humans have changed the earth, 
but very little or nothing about how humans 
themselves have changed along the way — not 
only as biological species, but also as culturally 
organised societies.
Indeed, more than a ‘used planet’ (Ellis et 
al. 2013) Earth with humans is a ‘lived planet’, 
historically built as practical — therefore mutually 
adaptive — coexistence with other earthly beings 
and things. As pointed out by many social 
theorists in the last twenty-odd years, human 
political societies can only remain as such in 
open and dynamic relationships with what is 
not human, i.e. other animals, plants, micro-
organisms, minerals (see, for example, Latour 
1993; Abram 1997; Ingold 2002; Plumwood 
2006). Human dependence on these relationships 
is so great that one might argue that, for all 
practical purposes, the true ‘social actors’ are not 
simply people, but the earthly organisations or 
networks in which humans take part in order to 
articulate beings, things and other natural forces. 
The effectiveness of human agency is closely 
conditioned by the ability to mobilise certain 
‘power lines’ in the dynamics of the earth. To 
the extent that they participate in the common 
ground of life, finding or inventing an ecological 
niche for themselves, humans mark the land and 
thus build continuity with future generations 
(Roymans et al. 2009). Always a work of joint 
authorship with the land itself (Plumwood 2006), 
every cultural landscape is at the same time an 
imprint and a matrix (Berque 1984), records of 
past relationships whose interpretation enables 
new human entanglements with the rest of the 
biosphere.
But although this account sounds perfectly 
reasonable when applied to concrete-and-steel 
environments, tropical forests at first glance 
seem a completely different matter. In general 
the natural side of the nature-culture continuum 
is so powerful to the point of erasing any human 
trace, semantically equating ‘forest’ and ‘nature’. 
This understanding pervades much of the current 
environmental debate, especially biodiversity 
conservation (Oliveira 2008; Oliveira & Solórzano 
2014). On the other hand, if one eventually 
learns that a given tropical ecosystem has been 
influenced by humans one tends to follow the 
pendulum to the other extreme, peremptorily 
labelling it ‘anthropogenic’ (Plumwood 2006). 
Indeed, it is as though our modern mind could 
only interpret the world through a purification 
process (Latour 1993). While the products of 
human metabolic exchange with tropical forests 
are so pervasive in everyday life — in the form 
of hardwood furniture, meat grown on cleared 
forests, climate change, protected areas, etc. 
— apparently one can only make sense of it 
through essentialist categories that preserve ‘the 
human’ and ‘the natural’ as homogeneous and 
separated domains. And yet, while ontological 
investigations can be fruitful and even necessary, 
perhaps the richest way to challenge this dualism 
is the contextual analysis of specific human 
social practices (Haila 1999; 2000). By giving up 
grand metaphysical categories and diving into 
the ‘observation of the world that is built along 
the river of time’ (Pádua 2010, p. 97) one can 
better address how ‘human activity and natural 
processes merge together’ (Haila 2000, p. 156).
A good place to work out this paradigm shift 
is the city of Rio de Janeiro, on the south-east 
coast of Brazil. Despite being fairly young, 
especially when compared to Old World cities, 
Rio’s territory has been intensely used and 
managed over its 450 years of neo-European 
history — not to mention the previous millennia 
urbanising rainforests 59
of indigenous presence (see Dean 1984; Lima et 
al. 2002). The land taken from the natives — an 
intricate mosaic of mountains, flooded plains 
and small hills mostly covered with rainforests 
and mangroves — was anything but conducive 
to dense human settlement. Urban growth was 
made possible through intense environmental 
change: deforestation, quarrying, levelling of hills, 
mountain tunnelling, land-filling of wetlands, 
plumbing and rectification of the existing rivers, 
and the opening of new drainage channels 
(Barreiros 1965; Pinto 1965; Bernardes 1990). 
In addition, the city stimulated the formation 
of a hinterland of extractive, agricultural and 
agro-industrial production both for its supply 
and for export. With the exception of gold 
mining — which did occur, but hundreds of 
kilometres away in the interior plateau — all sorts 
of market-oriented enterprises have been carried 
out in the territory that is now the municipality of 
Rio de Janeiro, including selective logging, wood 
fuel extraction, staple-food farming, pottery 
production, sugar-cane milling, and ranching 
(Abreu 1957; Lobo 1978; Brown 1992; Abreu 
2010).
Even so, Rio’s urban history is not a plain 
story of environmental degradation. At a certain 
point, in order to keep their city habitable, 
human residentswere forced to renegotiate 
their relationships with non-human neighbours; 
they called back the forests and protected them. 
Today, Rio has twenty-three full protected areas, 
covering 20 per cent of the municipal territory, 
37 m2 for each of its 6.5 million inhabitants 
(Lignani et al. 2011; IBGE 2014). Virtually all of 
these reserves could be classified as ‘novel’ or 
‘emerging’ ecosystems, i.e. land previously used 
but that eventually left the sphere of direct and 
intensive human management, evolving self-
organisedly in unprecedented directions (Hobbs 
et al. 2006; Lugo 2009; 2013; Mascaro et al. 2013; 
Morse et al. 2014). One can take snapshots of 
these processes by hiking in these protected areas. 
In the midst of mature forest it is easy to find 
whole tracts dominated by jackfruit (Artocarpus 
heterophyllus Lam.), an exotic tree species originally 
introduced in the mid-nineteenth century, when 
a reforestation project began to reclaim coffee-
devastated lands. Not uncommon are also large 
specimens of fig trees (Ficus spp.) spared from 
felling for religious motifs and which alter the 
successional process. More hardly noticeable are 
the small plateaus of blackened soil, evidence 
of charcoal manufacture. There have been 
discovered over a thousand abandoned charcoal 
kilns with local influence in species composition 
and dominance. To notice the conspicuous 
presence of banana (Musa paradisiaca L.), however, 
one needs no digging. Planted decades ago in 
any place accessible by mules — on the backs of 
which the fruits travelled to less rugged terrain 
— many of these wannabe trees remain in the 
landscape after being abandoned by their growers.
These are examples of plant communities that 
would be misleadingly labelled both as human 
disruption and as human domination. They are 
better described as ‘collaborative’ or ‘interactive’ 
landscapes (sensu Plumwood 2006). More exactly 
they are novel tropical forests shaped by the 
mutual adaptation between human practices and 
the agency of other natural beings — including 
exotic species — in an urbanising context. In this 
article we study two of the landscape features 
mentioned above, namely the sites dominated 
by jackfruit and the abandoned charcoal plants, 
which can be found in the two largest protected 
areas of Rio. Despite the similarities with the 
‘biographical’ approach (e.g. Roymans et al. 2009), 
our method is more pertinently affiliated to the 
long tradition of retrospective studies in historical 
geography (Sauer 1941; Baker 1968) and to the 
‘landscape-as-archive’ approach in environmental 
history (Turkel 2006; Oliveira 2008). For the 
historical reconstruction we use primary written 
sources and iconography, in addition to the 
relevant historiography. It is important to remark 
that, as in other similar studies (e.g. Matlack 1997; 
Barthel et al. 2005), we have no ambition to 
quantify the evolution of land use and land cover; 
our goal is just and only to put together narratives 
that give meaning to the present landscape from 
a certain theoretical standpoint.
60 landscape history
ENCOUNTERING PRESENT-DAY 
LANDSCAPES
As minor repercussions of the great uplift caused 
by the separation between African and South 
American continents, beginning 120 million years 
ago, two sets of rocky massifs currently rise from 
the fluvial-marine plain of Rio de Janeiro: Tijuca 
and Pedra Branca, both located west of down-town 
Rio (Fig. 1). With peaks over 1,000 metres high, 
these massifs are intensely dissected by narrow 
valleys of perennial and ephemeral streams. 
Currently, most of these forested mountains are 
legally protected: Tijuca National Park with 4,000 
hectares and Pedra Branca State Park with 12,500 
hectares. Along with the Mendanha Municipal 
Park (which is not entirely located within the 
municipal territory of Rio de Janeiro), Tijuca 
and Pedra Branca provide important ecosystem 
services to the city such as temperature control, 
rainfall regulation, biodiversity conservation and 
outdoor recreation (Lignani et al. 2011). But while 
Tijuca — recently inscribed by UNESCO on the 
World Heritage list — is the most visited national 
park in the entire country, with 2.5 million visitors 
Fig. 1. General appearance of the relief of the municipality of Rio de Janeiro. Tijuca Massif is in the east, near Guanabara 
Bay; Pedra Branca Massif is immediately to the west. Places marked on the map: 1) Macaranã River; 2) Morro do Castelo, where 
the city definitely settled; 3) Carioca River; 4) Pão de Açúcar (‘Sugar Loaf ’); 5) Serra da Carioca (Carioca Ridge); 6) Lagoa Rodrigo 
de Freitas (lagoon); 7) Botanical Garden; 8) Gávea Pequena River; 9) Pedra Bonita Peak; 10) Lagoa da Tijuca (Tijuca lagoon); 
11) Jacarepaguá Plain; 12) Camorim sugar mill; 13) Serra do Quilombo (Quilombo Ridge); 14) Guaratiba Plain; 15) Santa Cruz 
Plain; 16) Archer’s rural property. (Figure credits: Natural Earth [http://www.naturalearthdata.com/], ‘Gray Earth with 
Shaded Relief, Hypsography, Ocean Bottom, and Drainages’; IBGE, ‘Estado da Guanabara: Relevo e Hidrografia’, 1965.)
urbanising rainforests 61
in 2012 (ICMBio 2015), Pedra Branca is very little 
known even by locals.
In both parks, hiking is especially difficult 
after raining, which is very commonly the case; 
there is not really a dry season in this region 
of the Atlantic Forest biome (Nimer 1979).2 
Covered with a thick layer of dead leaves and 
branches, the forest floor remains wet almost year 
round. Physiographically, these are typical hillside 
rainforests. One makes her way through a majority 
of perennial tree species forming a continuous, 
thick and stratified canopy, dominated by trees 
20–35 metres tall, with emergent specimens 
even taller here and there. In the understory 
there is little light available and the temperature 
is significantly lower than in forest gaps. Along 
the tracks, tree trunks and loose rocks support 
various epiphytes, especially bromeliads; the 
deeper one goes into the forest, away from the 
paved roads, the greater the density of epiphytes.
But in Tijuca there is no need to ascend 
much to notice something quite interesting: 
jackfruit trees abound on the edge of most 
paved roads, and sometimes deeply embedded 
within the forest interior. These trees compose 
a particularly impressive landscape. From their 
thick trunks (up to 1 metre in diameter) hang 
enormous structures weighing up to 50 kg, 
simply the largest and heavier edible fruits known 
(Morton 1965) (Pl. I). Formidably crowded, 
almost giving the impression of a plantation, 
Tijuca jackfruit trees completely diverge from 
the tropical pattern of dispersion. One of the 
few studies revealed densities between eleven and 
twenty-eight individuals per hectare, whereas in 
the 10-metre-radius plots sampled between 40 
and 100 per cent of the trees were found to be 
jackfruit (Abrue & Rodrigues 2010). 
When one adds the information that this is 
an exotic species, one cannot help thinking of 
biological invasion. In fact, Abreu and Rodrigues 
(2010, p. 682) speak of ‘the most massive 
invasion’ promoted by a tree species in the 
Atlantic Forest biome. But if this is indeed 
the case, when did the invasion begin and how 
did it occur? Who brought the species and for 
what purposes? What were the specific historic-
environmental conditions that allowed such a 
successful acclimatisation?
Distant about 40 km from downtown Rio, Pedra 
Branca Massif is separated from the urban core by 
the vast plain of Jacarepaguá. Compared to Tijuca, 
the Pedra Branca Mountains are surrounded by 
less densely urbanised areas, although housing 
pressure and land speculation are currently 
growing. Within the park boundaries one can still 
find small human settlements, especially family 
farmers who arrived there before — sometimes 
long before — the official institution of the 
protected area in 1974 (Fernandez et al. 2015). 
Climbing theseslopes, jackfruit trees may be 
sighted, but not with the same level of dominance 
found in Tijuca. Here indeed, if one is looking 
for intriguing features, one must forget the canopy 
and watch out where one steps. While dodging 
the trees, one may end up stumbling on low stone 
walls that seemingly emerge out of nowhere. 
Looking around, one notices a strangely flat area; 
one digs a little with the boot and realises that the 
soil is especially dark in this part of the slope. What 
could this be? It is most likely human activity, but 
what kind? Slash-and-burn cultivation perhaps, 
but agricultural burning would hardly leave small 
charcoal fragments in the soil.
Talking to the oldest residents, the puzzle is 
partially solved: these are abandoned charcoal 
kilns (Pl. II). Realising the importance of the 
discovery, one starts looking elsewhere and, after 
a few years, the picture that emerges is that of 
an old ‘charcoal mountain’: eighty-one ruins and 
1,035 charcoal plants have been found to date 
in what is now dense forest. Charcoal kilns were 
found at altitudes of up to 1,000 metres above 
sea level, and homestead ruins were encountered 
far away from the sugar-cane plantations in 
neighbouring lowlands.
But many questions remain unanswered. 
Where did these charcoal makers come from? 
How was their activity connected to urban 
dynamics? When did it begin and when did it 
end? If one wants answers, there is no choice 
but to resort to written sources. Through them, 
one can build a narrative that makes sense of the 
present landscape.
62 landscape history
Plate I. a) A fallen and shattered jaca, with its exposed seeds on the forest floor; b) jackfruit seedlings; c) red exudate characteristic 
of jackfruit trunks; d) view of Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas from the Tijuca Massif; e) maturing jacas; f) new leaves of jackfruit.
urbanising rainforests 63
Plate II. a) Measuring a charcoal platform; b) small excavation showing the blackened soil of a former charcoal plant; c) ruin 
of a charcoal maker’s lodging; d/e) secondary succession on a former charcoal plant.
64 landscape history
CHRONICLING ECOGENESIS
city foundation and urban sprawl in the 
long run
Founded in 1565 with the aim of conquering 
and defending the entrance of Guanabara Bay 
and transferred a couple of years later to Morro 
do Castelo, a small hill on the edge of a poorly 
drained tidal plain, the city of Rio de Janeiro 
was unfavourably poised for obtaining fresh 
water (Abreu 1992). The subsequent urban 
development would be strongly influenced by 
these initial conditions (Lessa 2000). The search 
for fresh water inevitably led colonists to the 
Tijuca Mountains a few kilometres to the south-
west, from which small streams ran and quickly 
reached the bay or the Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon. 
The nearest of these waterways was the Carioca 
River, which rises in the ridge of the same name, 
more than 600 metres above sea level, and flows 
into the Flamengo beach, currently a landfill. 
For nearly two centuries, the slaves — at first 
indigenous and later African — fetched water 
from this river. Even if it was only 3 km away 
from the city, the dependence on a clear path on 
the beach to get such a precious resource was 
not exactly comfortable from a geo-strategic 
point of view; if the invaders managed to occupy 
Flamengo beach the city would inevitably fall. 
Thus it was desirable to bring water into the 
city. Apparently, the French invasion of 1710–11 
helped the authorities to realise the extent of the 
damage arising from a foreign assault. Accelerated 
or not by this mishap the plumbing works of 
the Carioca River were finally completed in 1723 
(Abreu 1992).
Although still a small town with no more than 
15,000 inhabitants, the city was growing due to 
late seventeenth-century discoveries of gold in 
the forested highlands of Minas Gerais. Rio was 
the port from which the royal tax on mining was 
sent to Lisbon. This growing geopolitical power 
culminated in 1763 with the city becoming the 
official seat of the Viceroyalty of Brazil (the city 
would remain the country’s capital until 1960). 
In the eighteenth century, Rio became the pivot 
node in the Atlantic networks through which 
circulated gold (including smuggled gold), slaves 
(mainly Angolans), cane brandy and cassava 
flour (exchanged for slaves on the African coast), 
among other goods (Lobo 1978; Brown 1992). In 
the rural hinterland there were numerous mills for 
the production of brandy and sugar, in addition 
to ‘flour mills’ and other staple-food farms 
(Brown 1992). At the turn of the eighteenth 
century, the city had about 60,000 inhabitants 
(‘Memórias’ 1884).
But the real economic and demographic take 
off would only happen as of 1808, when the 
Portuguese royal family fled from Napoleon’s 
troops to Rio de Janeiro, bringing the whole 
bureaucratic apparatus of the monarchy (Martins 
& Abreu 2001). Growth further intensified in the 
1850s, when the first railways were built, enabling 
residential occupation (Bernardes 1990; Abreu 
2006). This development marks the city’s entry 
into the Anthropocene: in the following 150 years 
Rio would become one of the largest cities on 
the planet. Considering only the municipality 
of Rio de Janeiro (i.e. excluding the rest of 
the metropolitan region), population jumped 
from around 60,000 in the early years of the 
nineteenth century to 6.3 million in 2010 (IBGE 
2010), while its built-up area increased from no 
more than 2 square kilometres (Luccock 1820; 
Barreiros 1965) or 0.001 per cent of the current 
municipal territory, to 531 km2 or 44 per cent of 
the territory (PCRJ 2011). Sprawling from east to 
west, the built-up area skirted the Tijuca Massif, 
first north and more recently south, reaching the 
Pedra Branca Massif only in the mid-twentieth 
century, when nearly a quarter of the municipal 
territory was already urbanised (Abreu 1957) (Fig. 
2). This differential space-temporality of urban 
engulfment was crucial in shaping the human 
land use.
coffee monoculture and water crisis
Until the seventeenth century, human occupation 
was restricted to the Tijuca Massif ’s foothills. The 
medium slopes and, at some points, the higher 
slopes were reached in the next century (Beltrão 
et al. 1997). But communication with those 
urbanising rainforests 65
mountains was still precarious and hampered 
denser human settlement. Passing a few weeks 
in Rio at the end of 1792, John Barrow, steward 
of a British diplomatic mission, reported that 
‘ten miles beyond the city suburbs, the paths can 
not be driven by a carriage’. In an excursion to 
Tijuca, Barrow and his companions were forced 
to walk a long stretch in order ‘to find a few 
horses that had been prepared for the trip’. Then 
they stepped into ‘a great forest, where thick tree 
trunks, fallen in the road, often prevented the 
passage’, forcing them to come down from their 
mounts. It comes as no surprise that deforestation 
was barely perceptible: according to Barrow, 
‘one does not see a single piece of bare ground’ 
(França 1999, pp. 224–5).
The arrival of the Portuguese court in 1808 
began to change that. The sudden transformation 
into the monarchy’s capital required profound 
urban reforms, including the transportation 
system. In the 1810s, the government improved 
the road connecting the urban nucleus to Tijuca, 
thus stimulating local economic activity (Viana 
1892). Better traffic conditions furthered the 
production of firewood and charcoal for urban 
households and handicrafts, besides grass for 
urban domestic herbivores (Cabral 2011a). 
Fuelwood demand was increasing pari passu 
population. In 1821, on the eve of political 
independence, a statistical survey indicated that 
the city had 112,695 inhabitants (Mapa 1870), 
little less than twice that which the Prince 
Regent and his entourage had found when 
they first arrived. ‘Many farmers are engaged in 
cutting timber,occasionally for their buildings 
or else for profit speculation’, reported in the 
1830s Carlos Augusto Taunay (2001 [1839], 
p. 254), an agronomist and owner of a coffee 
estate in current Alto da Boa Vista. British 
naturalist George Gardner noted, near the top 
of Pedra Bonita, a landowner ‘clearing away 
the forest’ and ‘converting the larger trees into 
charcoal’ (Gardner 1849, p. 24). In the late 1810s 
John Luccock had already noticed the spatial 
relationship between deforestation and urban 
development:
We should regret the change in these, till lately 
everlasting, woods, did we not recollect that they 
have contributed their portion to the wants of 
man; furnished to the city below them the valuable 
article of fuel, and still are employed in producing 
the necessaries, and many of the luxuries, of life. 
Enough of wood-land, also, is still left to please; 
and nature here can never disgust, though in scenes 
unaided by artificial ornament (Luccock 1820, p. 34).
Luccock would likely have changed his mind 
had he remained a few more years in Rio. As 
an insidious and aggressive ‘artificial ornament’, 
coffee plantations were expanding, especially in 
the Tijuca Massif, and in a short time one could 
no longer glimpse the primitive vegetation. Native 
to the understory of the Ethiopian plateau forests, 
Coffea arabica L. is a Rubiaceae shrub from whose 
beans, roasted and ground, one made a stimulating 
infusion, increasingly appreciated by Europeans 
(Dean 1995). Brought to Rio around 1760, after 
brief and unsuccessful attempts in Pará and other 
northern provinces, it soon began to be planted 
on the urban plain’s small hills. Sponsored by 
the government, coffee cultivation gained scale 
and finally reached Tijuca, whose rainy and mild 
climate was conducive to the plant. The first 
large plantations were established in the Gávea 
Pequena river basin, which drains into the Tijuca 
Lagoon. On those slopes, foreign entrepreneurs 
with previous experience in the coffee business 
established plantations following the Antillean 
model (Martins 2008; Marquese 2009).
However, some elements of this system — 
notably the denser planting in chess pattern — 
could not be deployed in Tijuca’s steep terrain. 
For convenience, farmers planted in rows up 
the hill, favouring soil erosion (Taunay 2001 
[1839]). Despite being a perennial crop, coffee 
plantations were not usually replanted, the old 
ones being simply abandoned; new forest tracks 
were cleared in order to continue cultivation. In 
addition, growers ignored the advantages of the 
shading system and commonly clear-cutted the 
forest (Dean 1995). Indicating the advance of 
deforestation, land sale ads announcing ‘virgin 
forest’ became rare as early as the 1840s (Abreu 
1992).
66 landscape history
Fig. 2. Urban sprawl of Rio de Janeiro and the situation of the Tijuca and Pedra Branca massifs, 1858–2010 (Data sources: 
Villaça 1998, PCRJ 2011).
urbanising rainforests 67
Deforestation unbalanced local hydrological 
and geomorphologic dynamics. The reduction 
of the soil’s ability to absorb water caused twin 
problems. On the one hand, it increased run-off 
towards the drainage channels, causing more 
frequent flooding. On the other hand, by flowing 
on the surface, rainfall failed to replenish the 
water table, reducing drinking water supply. At 
that time, the city still was entirely dependent on 
the streams of the Carioca Ridge for fresh water. 
In addition, slope deforestation substantially 
changed the urban climate below. In the five-
year period between 1851 and 1855, average 
rainfall in Rio was almost 20 per cent lower than 
seventy years before, with average temperature 
having increased almost 2°C (Los Rios Filho 
2000 [1946]). ‘The climate of Rio has been 
very much modified by the clearing away of the 
forests in the neighbourhood’, noted George 
Gardner (1849, p. 9) in 1836. According to this 
naturalist, deforestation was seasonalising the 
local climate, for summer was becoming drier. 
Earlier in that century another British visitor 
noted that in dry periods the public fountains 
became so crowded that ‘the [water] carriers have 
to wait for hours before they can be supplied’ 
(Mawe 1812, p. 98). These summer droughts 
were becoming harsher every year. Increasingly 
severe crises have been reported in 1824, 1829, 
1833, 1843, 1861, 1868 and 1869. As a unique 
phenomenon in the long period between 1851 
and 1990, rainfall dropped for two consecutive 
years (1868 and 1869) below the level of 800 
mm (Abreu 1992; Brandão 1992). The police 
tried to mitigate the suffering by carrying water 
to areas farther from the fountains (Cabral 
2011b). But at this point the water crisis was 
already unsustainable, as the urban population 
kept growing. While the population had grown 
1.2 per cent per year between 1821 and 1838, 
annual growth increased to 2.9 per cent in 
the period 1838–1872. In 1849, on the eve of 
the first great epidemic of yellow fever, the city 
had no less than 250,000 inhabitants (DGE 
1923). 
the reforestation of tijuca and the 
acclimatisation of jackfruit
In this emergency situation, the imperial govern-
ment decided to expropriate Tijuca private land 
for reforestation. Consolidated in 1861, the 
reclaimed lands began to receive seedlings of 
native and exotic tree species, some of them 
grown in the Botanical Garden at the foot of the 
Gávea Ridge. Many seedlings were provided by 
the reforestation director himself, Manuel Gomes 
Archer, who brought them from his estate in 
the Pedra Branca Massif western foothills. In 
the early 1890s almost 130,000 seedlings had 
been planted already, covering an estimated area 
of 170 hectares (Atala 1966; Castro Maya 1967; 
Drummond 1996; Oliveira 2007). Named ‘Tijuca 
and Paineiras Forests’, these plantations can be 
considered the first protected areas established 
in Brazil. Although mature vegetation that had 
survived in the higher and steeper slopes played 
a major role in the regeneration process, Archer’s 
nurseries were nonetheless important in the 
formation of what would officially become Tijuca 
National Park the following century.
Therefore, after being deforested for coffee 
cultivation, Tijuca forest eco system was partially 
restored with the help of other exotic species, 
among them jackfruit (Artocarpus heterophyllus 
Lam.). Native to India and the region encompassing 
south-east Asia (Zerega et al. 2010), jackfruit was 
part of an agricultural experimentation plan with 
which the Portuguese crown tried to boost its 
imperial economy in the context of declining 
prices for sugar. Launched around 1680, the plan 
was to introduce into South America certain Asian 
species with a potential market value in Europe. 
Capital of the once huge network of trading posts 
kept by the Portuguese in Asia, the Indian city of 
Goa was the centre from which both specimens 
and technical expertise were sent to Salvador, 
Bahian city that redistributed them to the rest 
of Brazil (Anthony 2013). As dehydrated seeds 
of jackfruit lose their ability to germinate within 
sixty days (Silva et al. 2007), the transfer had to be 
made by means of seedlings (in the oceanic vessels 
of the time, the journey from Goa to Salvador 
68 landscape history
never lasted less than six months). One of the 
first shipments, thirty-five to forty seedlings sent 
together with instructions for planting, arrived in 
Salvador in 1683 (Anthony 2013).
Historical accounts of the first century of 
jackfruit’s acclimatisation are still to be found. 
One of the first reports that went beyond the 
mere citation of the species is that of Luis dos 
Santos Vilhena, a professor of classical languages, 
in the late eighteenth century. He speaks of a 
‘monstrous’ tree, with ‘very rigid and interlocked 
wood’; from its trunk hung ‘monstrous Fruit’ 
whose extremely rough peel housed ‘seeds 
covered with edible and […] very sweet pulp […] 
allattached to a stem that runs inside the fruit’. 
According to Vilhena, it was mostly the poor who 
fed on jaca (the Portuguese word for the jackfruit’s 
fruit), ‘for it is sold in portions they can afford’ 
(Vilhena 1969, p. 711). In addition, jackfruit’s 
wood had interesting properties for shipbuilding. 
As it does not oxidise in contact with metals, 
jack-wood was suitable for manufacturing the 
curved pieces making up the vessel’s skeleton 
(Hutter 2005).
But jackfruit became popular essentially as 
a yard and garden tree. Besides being visually 
graceful, it served as a windbreak (Pio Correa 
1969). Because of these qualities, jackfruit became 
very common in chácaras, summer residences that 
rural nobles and wealthy merchants kept on the 
outskirts of major Brazilian cities. A century 
and a half after jackfruit’s introduction, Charles 
Darwin was able to observe how the species had 
dominated the peri-urban space in the north-east 
provinces. In 1832, the naturalist wrote in his 
journal that the landscape of Salvador suburbs 
‘almost takes its character’ from jackfruit and 
mango trees (Darwin 1909, p. 42).
From Salvador, jackfruit spread to the rest 
of the Atlantic Forest biome, both north and 
south. This continental sprawl was easier, as it 
could be made with seeds and even by vegetative 
means (Weech 1992 [1828]). Jackfruit’s adaptation 
to local environments was so successful that, 
without the current scientific concern with the 
‘indigeneity’ of species, people considered it as an 
equally Brazilian and Asian tree. Late eighteenth-
century dictionaries, like that of Moraes Silva 
(1789, p. 740), mark in the entry ‘jaca’ that it is 
an ‘Asian and Brazilian fruit’, without further 
distinction. According to Pio Correa (1969, 
p. 439), there were botanists who went so far as 
to name it as ‘Artocarpus brasiliensis’.
It is not known exactly when jackfruit 
arrived in Rio, but there is strong evidence 
indicating that it happened around 1780. None 
of the eighteenth-century reports included in 
the collections organised by França (1999; 2000) 
mention the species. There are references to 
orange, lemon, mango, banana and other native 
and exotic fruit trees, but never jackfruit. Without 
citing their sources, Chaves et al. (1967 in Abreu 
& Rodrigues 2010) claim that in 1803 the city 
had a few ‘naturalized’ individuals. The first 
direct evidence of local jackfruit is in the third 
volume of the Memorias de Mathematica e Physica da 
Academia Real das Sciencias de Lisboa [Memoirs of 
Mathematics and Physics of the Royal Academy 
of Sciences of Lisbon], published in 1812. In 
one of the articles, Bernardino Antonio Gomes 
describes jackfruit’s anatomy based on a Rio’s 
specimen. ‘It blooms in July and August, in the 
city’s chácaras’, writes Gomes, ‘where it is grown 
and is still rare; it is trivial in Bahia, where I could 
not verify whether it is indigenous’ (Gomes 1812, 
p. 89). As Gomes’s specimen was in reproductive 
age, it must had been planted at least five years 
earlier; however, considering the description 
of the trunk as ‘very thick and covered with a 
cracked bark’, it is very likely that it was at least 
four times older.
In the 1810s, there is another record of local 
jackfruit. Visiting the city in 1815, the prince of 
Wied-Neuwied Maximilian Alexander Philipp 
reported the presence of jaca, without further 
comments (Wied-Neuwied 1820). A couple of 
years later, the Bavarian scientists Johann Baptist 
Von Spix and Carl Friedrich Philipp Von Martius 
reported the presence of jackfruit in the alleys of 
the Passeio Público (Spix & Martius 1824, p. 174), 
the city’s first public garden and promenade, 
opened in 1783. In his Memorias Historicas do Rio 
de Janeiro [Historical Memoirs of Rio de Janeiro], 
published in 1822, Monsignor José Pizarro e 
urbanising rainforests 69
Araújo included jackfruit among the ‘fruits of 
this continent’, describing it as ‘a big pumpkin 
covered with a rough bark with sharp points, 
within which are the buds of a yellowish and 
fibrous mass’ (Araújo 1822, p. 104). 
The first pictorial record of a jackfruit tree in 
Rio was made in 1836, when its author, Benjamin 
Mary, was living in the city as ambassador of 
Belgium (Assis Jr. 2010). Mary’s lithograph 
served as a model for another drawing, the one 
that appeared in the first volume of Martius’s 
encyclopaedic work Flora Brasiliensis (Martius 
1996 [1846]). It depicts a rather large tree, at least 
10 metres high, forked trunk and covered with 
epiphytes, with large and dense canopy; it would 
hardly be less than thirty years of age (Pl. III). 
Although there are almost no data on the species’ 
growth rate, it has been reported that in Ceylon 
plantations twenty-year-old trees came to reach 
over 17 metres high and 71 centimetres in girth 
(Morton 1965).
As already mentioned, Gomes Archer provided 
many seedlings himself. An amateur botanist, he 
cultivated various native and exotic species on 
his estate at the foot of Cabuçu Hill, a western 
spur of Pedra Branca Massif. Years after Archer’s 
death (in 1905), journalist and environmentalist 
Armando Magalhães Corrêa visited the estate 
and found many species also present in Tijuca, 
among them jackfruit (Corrêa 1936). Another 
source of jackfruit genetic material was probably 
the Botanical Garden, an institution created by 
the Prince Regent in 1808 with the mission to 
acclimatise exotic species potentially useful to 
the country. In 1809 the first jackfruit seedlings 
were planted; they came from Mauritius Island, 
a French colony in the southern Indian Ocean, 
800 km east of Madagascar (Araújo & Silva 2010). 
It may even have been the case that Archer has 
used seed from local specimens; the existence of 
jackfruit trees in Tijucas’ chácaras is mentioned, 
for example, in José de Alencar’s novel Sonhos 
d’Ouro, published in 1872.
The list of species that Archer used in the 
reforestation project indicates that he was not 
willing to wait for the ‘normal’ process of 
secondary succession (Drummond 1996). He 
used many native species typical of mature 
forest and tried to help their success by planting 
other species which are fond of sun and grow 
fast in gap conditions, especially exotics such as 
eucalyptus and jackfruit. Archer may have noticed 
that, compared to most native species, jackfruit 
seedlings better tolerate desiccation, which would 
help them colonise devastated slopes. In fact, 
in South India jackfruit trees were grown for 
shading coffee, pepper and cardamom plantations 
(Morton 1965). At the same time, because the 
Pl. III. ‘Artocarpus integrifólia 
(jaqueira), de cuja sombra se vê a 
baía e a cidade de S. Sebastião do
Rio de Janeiro’ (Martius 1996). 
70 landscape history
species was well regarded for its nutritious fruit 
and its ornamental value in chácaras, it was likely 
considered a valuable species for reforestation due 
to its cultural usage in the city and in Tijuca itself. 
Reforestation was paying off, after all. Accord-
ing to the last report Archer wrote, in 1874, 
‘[all] stream headwaters covered with trees have 
released more water or remained at a stable 
level [as compared to the period before 1862]’ 
(in Drummond 1996, p. 95). But apparently it 
was too late for Tijuca streams to resume their 
former status of Rio’s main freshwater sources. 
Backed or not in earthly reality, engineers and 
entrepreneurs claimed it was necessary to collect 
water in the distant Serra dos Órgãos, 53 km to 
the north, as Tijuca streams were no longer 
sufficient for urban supply (Cabral 2011b). One 
of these distant springs was channelled in 1880, 
but the solution did not last long. In 1889, a few 
months before disgruntled military overthrow 
the monarchy and proclaim republicanism, a new 
and terrible water crisis was eventually resolved 
in six days, in an amazing plot involving political 
and media dispute and a young and audacious 
engineer (see Elias& Scarrone 2015).
Although it had lost much of its original 
purpose, the reforestation of Tijuca had already 
transformed the local hydro-ecology. Slopes were 
no longer naked, and jackfruit trees were probably 
bearing fruit. With the progressive normalisation 
of rainfall, again constant throughout the year, 
jackfruit’s fruiting became continuous and asyn-
chronous (see Abreu & Rodrigues 2010). Fruits 
of 30, 40, 50 kg rolling downhill and crumbling 
along the way were certainly a factor contributing 
to the spread of jackfruit away from their initial 
planting locations (Fig. 2a). Jackfruit reached the 
mountains for the first time. Until that point, it 
had been planted on the plains and small hills, 
like the one in B. Mary’s painting. This altitude 
change enhanced the so-called ‘barochory’, 
i.e. gravity dispersion syndrome. Growing on 
steep slopes 500 metres or more above sea 
level, jackfruit gained an immense power of 
colonisation downhill.
But this was not the only way jackfruit engaged 
the local environment. In Tijuca adult jackfruit 
trees were visited by several animals searching 
for food, including exotic species. Because of 
its close relationship with humans, who often 
study them or adopt them as pets, primates 
stood out among those. According to experts, 
the primate community of Tijuca has been 
completely remodelled since European arrival; 
none of the ‘original’ species can be found 
anymore. Nowadays, the most abundant species 
are exotics introduced in the early twentieth 
century, especially common marmosets from 
north-eastern Atlantic Forest (Callithrix jacchus) 
and what scientists believe to be a hybrid species 
of capuchin monkey (Cebus sp.). Both are highly 
prized as pets, and over time many specimens 
have probably been freed or else escaped from 
their urban homes around the park. With 
local densities estimated between 100 and 177 
individuals per km2, and 115–165 individuals per 
km2, respectively, the capuchin monkey and the 
marmoset are among the most important local 
consumers of jaca (Cunha & Vieira 2004; Cunha 
et al. 2006).
It is virtually impossible to know exactly when 
jackfruit became invasive in Tijuca. For this one 
would need long-term phyto-sociological records, 
the kind of data which up to this point does 
not exist, among other things because concern 
about biodiversity is very recent. In general, the 
spread of exotics did not constitute a problem 
for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century forest 
managers. Furthermore, some of these managers 
tended to view protected areas essentially as 
places of recreation and aesthetic appreciation, 
not paying much attention to conservation. This 
was the case of Gaston Louis Escragnolle, a 
high-patent military and influential courtier who 
replaced Archer as director of the forest reserve 
in 1874. While continuing with the forestry 
work, his main concern was to beautify the place. 
With the help of the French landscaper Auguste 
François Glaziou, Escragnolle turned Tijuca 
into a true promenade: he built bridges, panels, 
alleys, gazebos and several other implements 
appropriate for an ‘aristocratic English park’ 
(Taunay 1921, p. 110). This met the cultural 
demands of a society that was still struggling 
urbanising rainforests 71
to break symbolic ties with its colonial past — 
seen as barbaric and backward — proving itself 
capable of becoming a European-style civilisation 
(Heynemann 1995).
This kind of conception lasted a long time, 
at least until the official creation of the National 
Park in 1961. It was only in the late 1960s that 
the first program of biological management 
was implemented, a project for local wildlife 
restoration (Freitas et al. 2006). Although it all 
had started with plants, scholars and practitioners 
were slow to incorporate a concern with the 
flora’s active management, especially regarding 
the exotics. For example, in a broad floristic 
survey published in 1979 jackfruit was described 
as occurring ‘in almost the entire park’ without 
any further comment (Santos 1979, p. 73). Thus, 
jackfruit was allowed to spread without any kind 
of human control for almost a century and a half. 
Effective management began only at the end of 
the twentieth century, when foresters Henrique 
Guerreiro and Luiz Fernando Silva started a 
project for the ‘restoration of native vegetation 
by reducing the species Artocarpus heterophyllus’. 
Between 2000 and 2005, they cut 1,571 trees 
and bark-ringed another 813, besides uprooting 
almost 40,000 shoots (Guerreiro & Silva 2005).
charcoal manufacture on the slopes of 
pedra branca
In societal terms, the Portuguese colonisation of 
America created a rigidly hierarchical structure 
with a base composed of slaves, at first indigenous 
and later African. It is estimated that Rio de 
Janeiro has received almost 700,000 African 
slaves in the eighteenth century alone, mostly 
from Angola (Cavalcanti 2005). Although many 
of these captives were resold to other parts of 
Brazil, the city retained a significant proportion 
of them; from the most basic household services 
to the more specialised functions in the sugar 
agro-industry, almost all jobs were performed 
by enslaved Africans and African-Brazilians 
(Karasch 1987). Fed primarily with cassava 
flour, these ‘human energy converters’ were the 
mainstay of colonial economy (Cabral 2014).
Since the sixteenth century, the lands of 
Jacarepaguá parish — an ecclesiastical and civil-
administrative unit that throughout the nineteenth 
and early twentieth century encompassed all the 
lowlands between Tijuca and Pedra Branca — 
were occupied with slave plantations, mainly 
sugar, a situation that lasted until the late 
eighteenth century. Data for the year 1789 show 
that the parish housed 3,269 people, 1,839 of 
them captives, one of the highest proportions in 
the municipality (56 per cent). This slave population 
was the second-most unbalanced in terms of 
gender ratio, an attribute typically associated 
with highly capitalised and export-oriented rural 
economies: there were more than four men per 
woman (‘Memórias’ 1884). 
As in the rest of Brazil, many slaves managed 
to escape. Throughout the slavery era, many 
maroon communities (quilombos or mocambos) were 
established in Rio, some of them quite close to 
the city. For example, there was a quilombo in the 
current Leblon, near Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, 
only 12 km south-west of the early nucleus. But 
most quilombos surged further away, especially 
in rough terrain. The Pedra Branca south-east 
slopes were one such case, 40 km away from 
Rio’s urbanised area. These forests hosted many 
quilombos and the descendants of one of them 
(Camorim) are fighting to be officially recognised 
as such. This quilombo has likely been formed 
with slaves who fled the Benedictine property, 
a large estate encompassing the mountain’s 
foothills and adjacent lowlands. Furthermore, 
the monks from time to time took the initiative 
to manumit this or that slave; when war against 
Paraguay broke out in 1864 the monks sent many 
to the battle front, freeing them later. Finally, in a 
prelude to the ‘Lei Áurea’ [Golden Law], which 
would be sanctioned seventeen years later, all 
slaves of the Order of Saint Benedict were freed 
in 1871 (Fridman 1999). Many of these fugitive 
and freed slaves remained close to their former 
place of captivity, taking shelter in middle and 
high forested slopes of Pedra Branca.
From the point of view of the concrete 
economic opportunities offered by the larger 
society, charcoal manufacture was certainly one 
72 landscape history
of the most appealing for former slaves. Demand 
was high and constant, capital requirements 
were minimal (basically an axe, a hoe and a 
box of matches were all that one needed), 
and raw material was easy to obtain, although 
theoretically a government license was needed. 
The manufacturing process was quite simple and 
hadprobably remained unchanged for centuries. 
After clearing and levelling appropriate segments 
of the forested slope, charcoal makers started 
building the so-called ‘balloon’. It was a big cone-
shaped wood pile, covered with leaves and damp 
soil, in which firewood was subjected to pyrolysis, 
i.e., thermally decomposed by heating up to 500°C 
in an oxygen-free environment (Pl. IV). Besides 
the ‘chimney’ at the apex, there were small lateral 
vents which could be unclogged if there was need 
to reduce temperature. Pyrolysis could last several 
days, and the operators had to stay around day 
and night to regulate the combustion and avoid 
too rapid burning, which spoiled the charcoal 
(Corrêa 1936).
In order to facilitate the transport of raw 
material, charcoal manufacturers generally cut 
wood in the hillside above the plateau where 
the ‘balloon’ was located. The exploited area 
probably took the form of a 60-metre-radius 
semicircle around the ‘balloon’. Apparently, not 
all trees were cut down; there was a preference 
for thinner trunks. Talking to current residents, 
one was informed that trees with diameter at 
breast height greater than 1 metre were ‘left 
there for the earth’, that is, spared from felling. 
Economically it was not worth investing in all the 
work needed to knock more robust trees down 
and cut them into manageable pieces (Sales et al. 
2014). This is how portentous species such as 
C. estrellensis (Raddi) Kuntze, locally known as 
jequitibá, managed to escape the axe, helping the 
subsequent forest regeneration by attracting seed 
dispersers (especially birds).
Until the early twentieth century the producers 
took their charcoal themselves to the city on 
muleback. There is a picture portraying a ‘charcoal 
seller’ in the article naturalist Herbert H. Smith 
wrote on Rio de Janeiro for the 1879 edition of 
the Scribner’s Monthly. It depicts a barefoot black 
man dressed in breeches, cotton shirt and straw 
hat, riding a donkey loaded with two wicker 
baskets full of charcoal (Smith 1879). 
Like everything else in the capital, firewood 
and charcoal transportation changed deeply from 
the 1930s on. Rio’s growth and modernisation 
accelerated greatly in this decade. Highways 
erupted from the city, enabling quick access to 
the surrounding lowlands (Abreu 2006). Wood 
fuel began to be brought to the city in lift 
trucks, extinguishing the ‘delivery by donkeys, 
so typical of this service in Rio de Janeiro 
of yore’ (Magalhães 1961, p. 51). Moreover, 
automobile traffic changed the character of 
urban influence over the periphery, promoting 
Pl. IV. A charcoal ‘balloon’ in full 
operation (Corrêa 1936). 
urbanising rainforests 73
land-use change. Residential development for 
the new motorised middle class was further 
stimulated by government-sponsored drainage 
works in the late 1930s. As expected, it attracted 
aggressive land investment. Newspapers reported 
the often violent action of grabbers and real 
estate firms against small farmers, tenants and 
untitled occupants (Santos 2006; 2012). Although 
the charcoal people of Pedra Branca may not 
have been so upset — because of the kind of land 
they occupied — gentrification of the adjacent 
lowlands fostered the presence of state agencies. 
Forest Service inspection on illegal cutting 
restricted charcoal production (Bernardes 1959).
One way or another, charcoal producers had 
been losing their market for a while then. The 
most capitalised urban industries started using 
electricity in the early twentieth century. In 1908, 
a hydraulic power plant began its operations 
in a tributary of the Paraíba do Sul River, 100 
km north-west of Rio. With 12,000 kw of 
installed capacity, it was the largest plant in Brazil 
and one of largest in the world; the following 
year, two additional generators doubled its 
capacity (Estiliano & Araújo 2010). Very quickly, 
the industrial sector became dependent on 
hydroelectric power; at the end of the 1920s, the 
board of the Rio de Janeiro Industrial Federation 
was forced to bargain prices with the supplier, a 
Canadian company (Lobo 1978). For Rio, as for 
the rest of southern and south-eastern Brazil, 
electricity represented a technological revolution 
as important as that of coke in England two 
centuries before. As argued by Dean (1986), 
firewood and charcoal would never have allowed 
the great mid-century industrial boom.
Pedra Branca’s charcoal plants were gradually 
abandoned, undergoing spontaneous ecological 
regeneration, which quickly covered the slopes 
with secondary vegetation. From observations 
made in the late 1950s, a geographer wrote that 
‘the hillsides in Jacarepaguá no longer present 
vegetation gaps […], except small gaps facing 
the interior valleys, less subject to oversight’ 
(Magalhães 1961, p. 33). In 1974, the state 
government finally decided to prohibit any 
economic activity on the Pedra Branca slopes, 
creating a fully protected area. But traces of 
the charcoal producers are still there to be 
seen, at least for the trained observer. Not only 
as places of production, but also as places of 
residence, abandoned charcoal kilns influenced 
secondary succession, leading to original floristic 
compositions. Paying attention to current plant 
assemblages, one finds exotic species used 
in African-Brazilian religious rituals, such as 
comigo-ninguém-pode (Dieffenbachia seguine Jacq. 
Schott.), espada-de-são-jorge (Sansevieria trifasciata 
Hort. ex Prain), abre-caminho (Lygodium volubile 
Sw.), and pau-d’água (Dracaena fragrans (L.) Ker 
Gawl.). There are also exotic fruit species, such 
as abacate (Persea amerincana (Mill.) and laranja-
da-terra (Citrus aurantium L.), as well as a number 
of utilitarian plants, such as gourds (Crescentia 
cujete L.), used to make bowls, and the common 
bamboo (Bambusa tuldoides Munro), used to make 
baskets and sieves (Fernandez et al. 2015).
These charcoal landscapes are one of the few 
‘documents’ directly produced by those marginal 
populations who helped make the Pedra Branca 
Massif what it is today (Fraga & Oliveira 2012). 
As a subaltern social group, African and African-
Brazilians left few written records. Enslaved 
and illiterate, they generally have not had the 
opportunity to leave their own actions and world-
views recorded for posterity. Their lives must be 
tracked down in the land where they have lived 
and worked: for the ecological historian, hiking in 
the forest must be as informative as reading old 
codices. Field surveys in the Pedra Branca slopes 
provide us with a deeper understanding of past 
populations that until recently were only known 
through scarce written records and whose oral 
traditions are currently being lost or have already 
been extinguished.
CONCLUSIONS
Locally attracted by particular environmental 
settings and cultural-historical demands, the 
foundation and subsequent development of 
a city spatially focus the human engagement 
with the earth and its resources, creating 
niches, extinguishing and introducing species, 
74 landscape history
transforming native ecosystems. However, it is 
never about ‘humanising’ or ‘culturalising’ wild 
environments — in the sense of a dominating 
intentionality and technology — but of inscribing 
humans into the local, regional and global histories 
of the biosphere. As reminded by Hinchliffe and 
Whatmore (2006, p. 127), ‘there is more to city 
living than technology and culture or, more 
tellingly, more to technology and culture than 
human design’. In urban spaces, non-humans 
do not just exist as passive objects or unwanted 
intruders; as living presences, they co-produce the 
city through their inhabitations, participating in 
the emergent dynamics in their own way.
Having emerged as an outpost of early modern 
European-driven economic integration, Rio de 
Janeiro has been a ‘networked global city’ (sensu 
Francis et al. 2012) for 450 years, exchanging 
organisms, materials and ideasin unique bio-
geographical ways and with important ecological 
consequences. In other words, Rio has been 
a true bio-geographical cauldron where different 
species-in-flux meet, adapt and change, including 
humans. Virtually all the tropical forests with 
which the city currently dazzles foreign tourists 
are secondary vegetation that developed in 
close relationship with the surrounding urban 
environment. This relationship has always had 
a constitutive character, allowing one to speak 
of a city-forest co-emergence process. In a way, this 
is acknowledged in the recent inclusion of the 
‘Carioca Landscapes between the Mountain and 
the Sea’ in the World Heritage list, a decision 
justified with the assertion that ‘the city of Rio 
de Janeiro has been shaped by a creative fusion 
between nature and culture’ (UNESCO 2012, 
p. 211). In fact, if Rio is today a city full of 
forests, these forests on close inspection reveal 
themselves to be full of urban history — one just 
needs to know how and where to look.
Environmental historians have an important 
role to play in the debate about urban forest 
management. Although nothing restricts or 
discourages a more technical/pragmatic action — 
participating in environmental impact assessment 
teams, taking part in the formulation of public 
policies — perhaps their most important con-
tribution is to diversify the socially available 
narratives about our living spaces. To the con-
sternation of managing authorities, historians 
typically offer accounts of fluid, highly dynamic 
landscapes — and worst, ones unpredictably 
responsive to human actions. While this kind 
of material may reasonably seem useless to the 
personnel involved in the daily hard-work life 
of a national park, the societal construction of 
protected areas must be grounded in a broad 
public debate that goes beyond technical decisions 
and reaches the very meaning of protection and 
of what should be protected. Are protective 
efforts valid only in the case of supposedly ‘virgin’, 
‘wild’, ‘pristine’ lands? Exactly because they are 
the result and the condition of a promiscuous 
earthly life, forested cityscapes are critically 
important, providing environmental services, 
housing biodiversity and expanding the range 
of more-than-human encounters that shape and 
support citizenship.
notes
1. This research was partially funded by the 
National Council for Scientific and Technological 
Development (CNPq-Brazil), which supported 
the project ‘Historical mapping of localities for 
the documentation and analysis of territorial and 
environmental long-term changes (Brazil, 1530–
2010)’, Coordinator: D. C. Cabral.
2. Or at least there used not to be. Recently, Brazil 
has experienced sudden change in precipitation 
regimes. In 2014/2015, extreme drought struck the 
south-east, an event which, according to hydrological 
calculations, will not happen again in the next 
hundred years (ANA 2015). 
urbanising rainforests 75
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