Rio is a Bit of a Dump but Still Amazing

My wife and I spent a week in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil last month. On Day 1 and early Day 2 I felt a little cognitive dissonance. I thought Rio was a dump. I still do, but the city redeemed itself by the end of our stay.

My expectations seeded the regret. I wanted a luxury experience. I saw all the fancy hotels were in the famous Copacabana, an area I knew as young as 13 from the movies. It was the namesake of the preferred Manhattan nightclub of midcentury gangsters. I booked one of the best hotels overlooking the beach.

I expected an experience a little nicer than what you’d see in cities like Lima or Bogota, whose metro populations are a little smaller than Rio. And Rio has been richer for a lot longer. After all, nobody was naming swanky New York spots after Peruvian or Colombian areas.

I arrived to Copa with these elevated expectations. I ultimately dubbed the area, “Chapinero at the beach,” after the gritty Bogota neighborhood I lived in during the heyday of this site. I named it that for the vagrants laying around asleep and panhandling children panhandling. But the first oddities to catch my eye were the public parks. They were almost entirely empty. They had no gardens, nothing nice. Even the cement surface wasn’t maintained.

Note: I lived in Chapinero from 2009 to 2012. I have been informed that it isn’t so gritty anymore. The analogy doesn’t work but it’s too late to change it.

The main avenue had stores selling towel or cell phone cases. You would never see that on Lima’s Avenida Larco or Conquistadores. No way. Around the corner from our five-star hotel was a watering hole where shirtless middle-aged men drank beer from returnable bottles in small disposable plastic cups while sitting on plastic stools at plastic tables. It was never empty, always full of the aforementioned clientele getting drunk.

I thought this area would be nicer than its counterparts in Lima and Bogota, and was surprised to find it’s not even nice. It’s Chapinero’s Karrera 13 at the beach. Or Lima’s Arenales with many more people. We heard Ipanema is nicer and we made it there on Day 1 too. It was a degree nicer, nothing to change the overall verdict that Rio is a dump.

I realized this is maybe what I saw and felt in Buenos Aires: there isn’t much that is very nice. And that led me to conclude that I may be spoiled by having lived in cities like Lima and Bogota. Rio has nothing like Miraflores or the Malecon. We found no San Isidro, no Parque 93, or even a Parque Lleras.

Twenty-five years of economic stagnation erodes the beauty, while the swanky areas of economic stars like Peru and Colombia left its Brazilian counterparts behind. Something else that Peru and Colombia would have working for them would be recency. They’re the stars of the latest generation. They’re new money, not old money. Their nice stuff is still nice. Give it another generation and maybe populist policies allow their nice areas to atrophy as well. Maybe.

But for now, 2025, Rio is a bit of a dump. That was what I thought as we entered Day 2, which was slated for downtown. If Copa looked like Chapinero, I was steeling myself for what o centro would be.

And I was surprised again, pleasantly this time, to see a cleaner, nicer part of town than Copacabana itself. In all my Latin American travels, I don’t think I’ve seen a downtown area this clean and safe. Maybe downtown Mexico City was close, but it didn’t beat Rio.

I was told that downtown Rio is a different story at night, that the professionals evacuate starting around 6 p.m. But I didn’t see it. I only saw light crowds of mostly professionals walking clean streets in a beautiful historic city center. Only complaint was it was a little car-friendly at the expense of pedestrians. Another oddity.

This began the redemption tour.

The next day we hiked in Tujica national park, which showcases Rio’s natural beauty and biodiversity. What in Peru is affectionately called its “costa, sierra y selva,” Rio has all three of those in one region.

On Day 4 we visited Petropolis, a small city an hour and a half outside city where the last emperor of Brazil and Portugal built a vacation home. From the look of how much sprung up around that home, I gathered he spent most of his time there, and at least entire summers (it’s at altitude, so cooler).

In zipping around the city we saw the Latin American standard high walls in the rich parts of town, with probably luxury unseen behind. But what was different was the height of these walls. Where in Lima or Bogota, you might have 10- or 20-foot walls topped with spikes, Rio had 30- or even 50-foot walls. You sometimes couldn’t even see the towers behind them.

Thinking about those walls brought me back to one of my original career mentors, who spent a lot of time in South America for Anheuser-Busch. He told me back in 2007 about the social stratification and inequality, and specifically the high walls.

Thinking about that brought me back to my own visit in 2007, when a group of InBev guys told me their company was looking at buying Anheuser-Busch. I swore it wasn’t true, and that if it happened then I’d move to South America to launch my career. I ended up doing that in early 2008, and the hostile takeover of AB happened later.

It also brought me back to how long I held on to a dream of Brazil. After a year in Peru, I moved to Colombia in 2009. And for at least a year after, maybe two, I still hoped to eventually make my way to Brazil. Somewhere around 2011 I realized that truly digging in takes a lot longer than you think. Starting over from zero, and a new language to boot, was a heavier lift in reality than when dreaming.

I thought about all that among the lush forests and mountains jutting into the beach, the friendly Brazilians, the charming Portuguese, the old-school samba, the good food (not quite great). And we left thinking that Rio deserves every bit of renown that it enjoys as an exotic, sensual city… even if the city itself is a bit of a dump.