Christ the Redeemer

Christ the Redeemer stands thirty metres tall on top of Corcovado mountain, with arms stretching twenty-eight metres wide over Rio de Janeiro. It was completed in nineteen thirty-one after nine years of work, and the idea behind it was older still, first proposed in the eighteen fifties and revived after the First World War by Brazilians who wanted a monument visible from every corner of the city.

It is a genuinely international object. The Brazilian engineer Heitor da Silva Costa led the project, the French sculptor Paul Landowski shaped the figure, and the Romanian artist Gheorghe Leonida modelled the face. The head and hands were made in France and shipped across the Atlantic in pieces, then carried up the mountain on the small rack railway that tourists still ride today.

The surface is what makes it glow. The reinforced concrete core is covered in thousands of small triangular tiles of soapstone, a soft grey stone chosen because it resists weather and heat. Volunteers, many of them local women, glued the tiles onto fabric backing by hand, and some of them wrote prayers and names on the reverse side, so there are messages sealed inside the statue that nobody will ever read.

Standing seven hundred metres above the beaches, it also takes a beating. The statue is struck by lightning several times each year, and a strike in twenty fourteen chipped a thumb, which had to be repaired with stone from the original quarry.

Nearby you can ride the cable car up Sugarloaf Mountain for the opposite view, walk in the Tijuca Forest that surrounds Corcovado, or descend to Copacabana beach where the city meets the Atlantic.