Book Rio de Janeiro theatre, tours & attraction tickets

Few cities announce themselves quite like Rio de Janeiro. The approach by air or sea makes the point immediately: a sprawling metropolis pressed between the Atlantic Ocean and a series of granite peaks that rise so abruptly from the urban fabric that the boundary between city and wilderness is genuinely difficult to locate. That tension, between the natural and the built, the serene and the frenetic, is what gives Rio its particular character and what draws visitors back long after a first trip.

The two landmarks that define the city's silhouette are also the ones that reward the most attention. Christ the Redeemer, completed in 1931 and standing at the summit of Corcovado mountain within the Tijuca National Park, is one of the most recognisable sculptures on earth, and the views from its base across Guanabara Bay and the southern beaches are genuinely disorienting in their scale. The Corcovado rack railway, which climbs through dense Atlantic Forest to reach the statue, is itself part of the experience rather than mere logistics. Sugarloaf Mountain, reached by a two-stage cable car from the Urca neighbourhood, offers a different perspective entirely: from its summit, the city appears almost improbably beautiful at dusk, the lights of Flamengo and Botafogo reflected in the bay below. Several of the experiences available through the catalogue combine both summits into a single day, and a helicopter circuit that takes in both peaks and the coastline gives a sense of the city's topography that no ground-level visit quite replicates.