Water and Wellbeing in Colonial Rio de Janeiro
A StoryMap based on paper delivered at the Social Science History Association, November 16, 2023, Washington, D.C.
Introduction
The theme for the Social Science History Association's 2023 annual conference is "Pursuits of Wellbeing," which is particularly relevant to the history of water in cities. For any city, having sufficient water, and the infrastructure to distribute it equitably to all, is essential for wellbeing.
The human body requires water daily, and individuals and their families thrive when there is easy, equitable access to water. Neighborhoods are enhanced when water is available for recreation (such as public swimming pools) or for aesthetic enhancements (such as decorative fountains). For these reasons, water is an index into wellbeing.
Meeting even the basic human needs for all residents is not a given in many cities of the global south today. And as the history of water infrastructure in Rio de Janeiro reveals, patterns followed in the past, particularly during colonial times, is one reason why this is so.
Water security can be defined as having reliable access to sufficient water suitable for all domestic uses. As the map shows, the opposite, or water insecurity, is very real in low- and middle-income countries around the world. According to a recent study, sixteen percent of adults in Brazil are estimated to have experienced water insecurity in 2020.
In the global south, rural to urban migration has led to mega cities with poor infrastructure for delivering water. Yet, it is not only modern growth that is responsible for the inequitable access to clean water. Water infrastructure today rests on legacies from the past.
Water insecurity has deep roots. Because many cities of the global south developed from forts, ports, or administrative centers built in colonial times, they have inherited patterns of water distribution that still carry vestiges from the colonial era. For example, some modern mega cities were originally situated in places without easy access to fresh water. Not only in the colonial period but until modern times, access to water has always been difficult.
Moreover, during colonial times, funds for building water infrastructure in a colonial city were meager. As a result, colonial water infrastructure was minimal and delivered water inequitably. Such was the experience of Rio de Janeiro.
The city of Rio de Janeiro lies on the western shore of the Guanabara Bay, which opens to the Atlantic Ocean. The waters of the bay are salty, but many freshwater streams empty into it.
In colonial times, the city center developed in an area with little fresh water, and even when water was brought into the city via a built infrastructure, only the wealthy had reliable access to daily water needs. Moreover, they gained that access from another institution characteristic of many colonial societies: slavery.
We can identify four distinct eras in the history of Rio de Janeiro's colonial water infrastructure. These four eras are:
- Contact and Conquest: 1502-1565
- Early Colonial: 1565-1722
- High Colonial: 1723-1822
- Post Colonial: 1823-1889
First Era: Contact and Conquest: 1502-1565
In the sixteenth century, when European ships first began to sail into the Guanabara Bay, they found a distinctive watery environment with fresh and salt waters combining in lagoons, mangroves, tidal pools, and marshes. The Native peoples living around the bay had high access to excellent fresh water for drinking.
Reliable access to good drinking water came from the long-standing ways that Native peoples had interacted with many different kinds of water in the Guanabara Basin. Fresh water, which the Native peoples called uh-een, flowed down the steep hillside slopes and emptied into meandering rivers, mangroves, lagoons, or the bay itself. Salt water—uh-ete—harbored fish, oysters, dolphins, and the occasional whale. Stagnant waters—uh-een buhc were a rich source of crustaceans, birds, fish, and small mammals.
Native villages, composed of several longhouses surrounded by a palisade (or fence), were scattered along the shores of the bay and on the largest island (today Ilha do Governador). Native villages moved often, and this maintained direct access to fresh water. Women and children carried water from these streams to their families, who had a space in one of the longhouses.
Created in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, the cartographer of this map plotted the sites where the Native villages, named in sixteenth-century chronicles, might have been. These locations do not necessarily locate where the Native villages actually were, but the map conveys the understanding that the Guanabara Basin was well settled during the era of contact and conquest.
Anon. La france antarctique, autrement le Rio Janeiro. Bibliothèque nationale de France, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8596692z .
The contact and conquest era brought major changes to the lives of Native peoples. At first, ships from Portugal, France, and Spain entered the Guanabara Bay intermittently. Some came to trade, others to replenish their water casks and food supplies. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the value of the bay as a strategic possession became clear to France and Portugal.
As can be seen in this stylized map of the Guanabara Bay, a naval battle is taking place between two huge ocean-going sailing ships: one is under the Portuguese flag and the other under the French. Natives can be seen in canoes on the bay. This encounter, which took place in October, 1554, illustrates the competition over the bay and the recruitment of Native allies by the French.
Even though the European ships dwarf the smaller Native canoes, the mapmaker illustrates that the shores around the bay still belong to the Native peoples. Their palisaded villages, each with three or four longhouses, are clearly visible. As late as 1554, Native peoples continued to follow their traditional ways of living, and they continued to get their drinking and cooking water from fresh flowing streams.
Hans Staden, Warhaftige Historia, Marburg: 1557), https://archive.org/details/warhaftigehistor00stad/page/n125/mode/2up .
In the Contact and Conquest era, there were inequalities in the getting of water, for it was women and children who carried the water in clay pots from the streams to the longhouses. Also, the threat of extreme weather events, such as torrential rains or drought, brought times of water insecurity. Yet, factoring in these patterns, on the whole indigenous groups had reliable access to excellent water for drinking, cooking, and bathing. Minimal standards for wellbeing were met and even possibly exceeded. It is likely, for example, that some enjoyment of water--such as swimming--took place daily.
However, this would not last for much longer, as the competition over the Guanabara Bay between France and Portugal erupted into a war. Allied with the French, the Native peoples were dragged into the conflict and suffered a catastrophic fate from its eventual outcome: the loss of their place and their traditional ways of life in the Guanabara Basin.
Era Two: Early Colonial, 1565-1722
Access to fresh clean water changed quite dramatically in the early colonial era. The first European settlements had poor access to drinking water. This pattern can be seen even before the founding of the royal city of Rio de Janeiro.
In 1555; the commander of the French expedition decided to build the fort on an island with no source of fresh water. Later, following the Portuguese defeat of the French in 1560, the first sites for the royal city of Rio de Janeiro were similarly situated in sites with little fresh water. Moreover, with the defeat of the French, the traditional indigenous lifeways were lost in the Guanabara Basin. This occurred because the Native chiefs were perceived as allies of the French, and following the expulsion of the French, the Portuguese and their Native allies massacred, enslaved, and expelled the Tupinambá peoples who traditionally had lived around the bay. Subsequently, life in the newly founded city of Rio de Janeiro took a different tack. It did not revolve around daily interaction with the different waters of the Guanabara Bay.
Instead, residents in Rio de Janeiro separated themselves from the indigenous ways of life. In 1565, the second site selected for the center of the royal city center was on the top of a hill that overlooked the entrance to the bay. The royal grant for the city was so extensive that it included much of the lands on the southwestern side of the bay. Many smaller tracts were handed out to early colonists as land grants, known as sesmarias. The tiny city center resembled an acropolis: a fort on the hill known as the Morro do Castelo (Castle Hill).
Once the Portuguese Crown developed a series of forts to defend the bay, the city center moved down from the hilltop and expanded along the beachfront that served as Rio's harbor. Because there was no nearby source, all fresh water had to be carried in.
Although there is no direct evidence, it is most likely that enslaved indigenous men, women, and children brought water into the city daily. These water carriers would have come from the defeated Native groups who once lived around the bay. Other water carriers, not necessarily legally enslaved but also indigenous, probably carried water, too. These indigenous peoples would have come with the first settlers, many of whom were from São Paulo.
This map shows the location of the first European settlements in the Guanabara Bay. The French nobleman Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon who commanded the French expedition, founded Fort Coligny in 1555 on an island that had no lakes, rivers or springs. The only fresh water available at the fort came rainwater collected in a cistern. A newly arrived missionary described it "as green and filthy as an old frog-covered ditch.¨ 1
When the Portuguese Crown chartered the royal city of Rio de Janeiro as part of its strategy to reclaim the Guanabara Bay from the French, the first site selected by the commander of the Portuguese forces lay in an inlet, and it resembled a military camp. There was limited fresh water. Five years after the defeat of the French and their Native allies in 1560, the city moved to a second site, on top of a hill well inside the bay. This site, too, had limited water suitable for drinking or cooking.
1 Jean de Léry, Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Bresil, autrement dite Amerique. . . (Geneva: Antoine Chuppin, 1578), 64. https://archive.org/details/histoiredunvoyag01lryj .
Over time, as the danger of attacks from the French and Native groups declined, and as the Portuguese Crown funded the building of forts to protect the entrance to the bay, the residents in the walled city center began to move down from the acropolis on the Morro do Castelo. Even though there was no easily accessible source of good fresh water, the lower city began to expand along the beachfront, directly below the upper city. The nearest source of fresh water came from the Carioca River, where mariners had long anchored to fill their water casks. However, the river was quite distant. This meant that water had to be carried into the city by water carriers. Possibly, water was brought to the city by boat, but no direct evidence of this can be found in the surviving historical records.
One hundred years after its founding, the city of Rio de Janeiro still did not have any built infrastructure to deliver fresh water into the city. Water was carried into the city by domestic servants, the majority of whom were enslaved.
This map recreates the city in 1665, and shows the growth of a network of streets in the lower city. These streets extended between four major hills. Below these and other hills, the land was low-lying, and prone to flooding from heavy rains. Mangroves lay at the back of the city and lagoons formed near the shore.
Following a disastrous attack on Rio by the French in 1711, the military engineer João Massé drew this map to show where a proposed city wall should be built to protect the city. Notably, there is no mention of the city's water supply on this map. Although work had begun on an aqueduct, and maps by French naval officers who were in Rio in 1711 do include an aqueduct that may have brought water to the outskirts of the city, no aqueduct and no city fountains appear on Massé's map.
Thus, in the early colonial era, Rio's fresh water was extremely limited, and most of it would have been of poor quality. Possibly, much of the fresh water used daily was drawn from cisterns that stored rainwater. More was carried into both the upper and the lower city. By the early 18th century, enslaved Africans were arriving in Rio, and they likely joined indigenous water carriers. Both the supply of fresh water and access to it was low. Moreover, water was hardly associated with wellbeing. The entire infrastructure for delivering water was highly exploitative and relied on forced labor.
Era Three: High Colonial, 1723-1822
During the high colonial era, Rio de Janeiro received excellent water from the headwaters of the Carioca River by way of a long aqueduct that fed several public fountains. This infrastructure had been built slowly and had required lengthy negotiations between the city council, the governors, and the crown. Even when excellent fresh water was finally available in the city, it was distributed inequitably. Not only were there very few fountains, all located in the southern parishes, but the city relied on enslaved, and other forced, laborers to carry water through the streets.
Rio's political importance increased during this era, and this influenced the development of the water infrastructure. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Rio served as the port for the internal mining region of Minas Gerais, which grew rapidly following the discoveries of gold at the end of the seventeenth century. The role of the port city in the export of gold and the import of goods headed for the mining regions underscored the urgent need for water infrastructure. In 1763, Rio became the capital of colonial Brazil, and the viceroy (the highest-ranking colonial official in Brazil, who reported directly to the crown) resided in the city. Resident viceroys patronized the design and erection of more public fountains, and they contemplated the building of a second aqueduct. When the royal family and court arrived in 1808 (having left Lisbon just as Napoleon's troops were invading Portugal), Brazil became a co-kingdom, equal to Portugal, and the seat of the crown. The limitations of Rio's water supply became abundantly clear. A second aqueduct was completed, and more fountains opened.
Throughout the seventeenth century, Rio's governors and city council members, as well as its residents, recognized that the best water came from the Carioca River. Building some sort of channel was discussed as early as the first years of the sixteenth century, and contracts were signed with individuals to begin work. When, in 1648, a recently-arrived magistrate found no functioning aqueduct, he proposed laying wooden troughs, some to be placed on top of arches, to deliver “the precious liquid” of the Carioca River to the outskirts of the city. 2 After this point, work did begin on an aqueduct, but progress was very slow.
There are few surviving records on how Rio’s first aqueduct was designed and constructed in the seventeenth century. Still, they suggest that Native laborers from the Jesuit mission villages from the other side of the Guanabara Bay were organized into work gangs to dig the channels and to lay the stones. When the aqueduct first began to deliver water remains unknown, but in 1711, after Rio was attacked and ransomed by a French fleet led by René Duguay-Trouin, multiple maps made by French naval officers show an aqueduct reaching the outskirts of the city center. After 1711, reinforcing the forts that had failed to protect the city from the attack was a priority of the crown. Nevertheless, the aqueduct did gain some attention, as this plan from 1718 shows. A new course for the aqueduct on raised arches is proposed to replace the older, winding course.
Not until 1723 did Rio have a functioning aqueduct that brought fresh water into the city where it was delivered free of charge to the city residents at a newly erected fountain.
2 O Rio de Janeiro no século XVII: accordãos e vereanças do Senado da Câmara, copiados do livro original existente no Archivo do Districto Federal, e relativos aos anos de 1635 até 1650 (Rio de Janeiro: Oficinas Gráficas do Jornal do Brasil, 1935), 160-161.
The aqueduct began high in the Tijuca Forest where water was channeled into a small square stone reservoir called the Mãe d’Agua (Mother of Water). The waters descended gradually down the hillsides towards the city. The water was exceptionally clean and pure, except after torrential rains.
Rio's first public fountain, was called the Carioca, as it presented the headwaters of the Carioca River to the residents of the city. The fountain began to flow in 1723.
Designed in Portugal, the marble stones for the Carioca fountain were cut in Portugal and shipped across the Atlantic. The fountain had a triangular form with sixteen bronze spouts that extended from the sculpted heads of lions. Topping the fountain was a royal coat of arms and an inscription that credited the king and the governor for the monumental work.
The opening of the fountain changed life in the city immediately. Enslaved domestic servants began queuing at the fountain early in the morning to fill barrels and jars with water, and the fountain remained busy all day. The city council hired a sentinel to keep order. Eventually, tanks were installed next to the fountain where laundry could be washed and dried.
One unexpected problem was the accumulation of excess water—the fountain delivered more water than could be taken. As there had not been a plan for the draining of this water, it accumulated and flooded the area around the new fountain. Residents and doctors petitioned the crown to drain the overflow, as it was damaging houses and causing, they believed, disease to spread. Eventually, a ditch, known as the Vala, was dug at the back of the urban center, and it channeled the excess water to the Guanabara Bay.
A double-arched water bridge replaced an older section of the Carioca Aqueduct in 1750. This monumental water arcade, known today as the Arcos da Lapa delivered water directly from the Morro de Santa Teresa (St. Theresa Hill) to the Morro de Santo António (St. Anthony Hill).
A plaque, still visible today, has an inscription that credits the King and the governor.
King John V, Our Lord, ordered this work by the most illustrious excellency Lord Gomes Freyre de Andrada of his counsel, [and] Major General of his army, Governor and Captain General of the Captaincies of Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, year 1750.
In 1750, a second, monumental pedestal fountain was raised in the main square of the lower city, the Largo do Carmo. This fountain served the central city area, and because the square opened up on one side to the Guanabara Bay, the new fountain also served ships coming into Rio's harbor.
The ship carrying James Forbes , a writer and artist heading for India with the British East India Company, stopped in Rio for repairs in 1765. Sometime during the three months Forbes was in Rio, he made this sketch of the city. The old city can be seen on top of the Morro do Castelo, while the lower city extends along the waterfront. A large pedestal fountain can be seen in the square; see detail.
As this map created from imagineRio shows, by 1750, significant improvements to the water infrastructure had been made. The aqueduct, with its arcade, two fountains, and underground pipes carried water from the Carioca Fountain to the Largo do Carmo Fountain.
Captain Cook , en route to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus across the sun, stopped in Rio in 1768. He described how water flowed down through the aqueduct to the fountain on the main square where his sailors replenished the water casks on the Endeavour:
Water] Convey'd a Cross a Deep Valley by an Acqueduct, which consists of a great Number of Arches placed in 2 Rows, one upon the other; from thence in pipes to a fountain which stands in the Middle of the Square before the Vice-Roy's Palace. . . . it is likewise here that the Ships Water. They land their Casks upon a Smooth sandy beach about 100 yards from the Fountain, and upon application to the Vice-Roy you have a Sentinel to look after them and to clear the way for to come to the fountain to fill water. 1
1 James Cook and W. J. L. Wharton, Captain Cook’s Journal During the First Voyage Round the World (London, 1893), 17. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8106/8106-h/8106-h.htm .
After Rio became the capital of Brazil in 1763, the viceroys began to patronize the building of fountains. As these fountains often had Latin inscriptions, it suggests that the viceroys sought to imitate Roman ideals.
For example, the Gloria fountain, inaugurated in 1772, carried a Latin inscription that praised the viceroy not only for erecting the fountain, but also for other improvements he had made in the city.
Inscription:
To Luis de Almeida, the Marquis of Lavradio, Viceroy of Brazil, who restrained the sea with the construction of a huge wharf, improved public buildings, leveled the streets, and renovated the city, to this conservator of the city, the Municipal Council and the people of Rio de Janeiro erected this [fountain? plaque?] in 1772.
Some fountains were especially aesthetic, such as the Marrecas Fountain, designed by the Brazilian-born artist, Mestre Valentim. Built in 1785, its statues and spouts were the first bronze sculptures cast in Brazil.
The fountain's Latin inscription again praised the viceroy:
During the reign of Maria I and Pedro III, a once plague-ridden lake was drained and took the form of a promenade. The waters of the sea were held back by a huge wall. Fountains with bronzes gushed with water. Some walls were knocked down, and a garden was transformed into a street where houses were built in admirable symmetry. Under Viceroy Luiz de Vasconcellos de Souza all this was accomplished. The people of Rio de Janeiro, give thanks. The 31st of July 1785.
Leandro Joaquim, Revista militar no Largo do Paço, 1750-1798. https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/revista-militar-no-largo-do-pa%C3%A7o-leandro-joaquim/egHPz2nUxxz4Rg?hl=pt
The main square of Rio became known as the Largo do Paço (Palace Square), and when it was redesigned in the late eighteenth century, its original pedestal fountain was pulled down. Mestre Valentim designed a second fountain, built this time from local granite. The new fountain was erected along the new seawall. In his painting of a military parade on the Largo do Paço, the artist Leandro Joaquim shows the new fountain anchoring the space between the city and the Guanabara Bay. It was now possible to refill casks from the water as well as from land. The redesigned square and the new fountain created a much more majestic space that emphasized Rio's status as the capital of Portugal's most important colony. The new fountain had two inscriptions, both in Latin.
The city's residents relied on water carriers to get the water from the fountains to their homes and businesses. Yet the water carriers of colonial Rio do not appear often in historical documents. However, they can be glimpsed in the sketches, watercolors, and textual descriptions created by visitors to Rio. A water carrier with a pot on his or her head appears at the left front of this engraving, published in London in 1812.
As the number of visitors increased in the city, following the arrival of the royal court, water carriers became a common sight in the sketches and paintings, as well as in the written descriptions penned by travelers. The monumental fountains with their Latin inscriptions often fade into the background as the visiting artists focus on the water carriers. Some water carriers were the enslaved domestic servants of wealthy residents; others were enslaved but semi-independent water carriers who sold water in the city and paid most of their earnings back to their masters. In the watercolor of the Marrecas Fountain by the French artist Arnaud Julien Pallière, the male water carrier with a huge pot on his head and a purse around his body is likely an enslaved man working as a water carrier. Other water carriers at the fountain are more likely to be enslaved domestic servants. Scenes such as this one convey the clear impression that the wealthy in Rio did not interact directly with the fountains. Instead, their experience of water was mediated by the water carriers.
Not only was most water carried by enslaved people in Rio, but some were doubly enslaved. Prisoners carrying water were a common sight in Rio following the arrival of the Portuguese royal court in 1808. Thomas Ender painted this watercolor of six chained prisoners in 1817. Some, if not all, of the water carriers may have been enslaved, too. Delivering water could also be a punishment handed down to soldiers, who, as prisoners, had the task of supplying water to the regiments in the city. Jean Baptiste Debret sketched a chained soldier delivering water in a mule-drawn cart in 1822.
By the end of the high colonial era, the Carioca Aqueduct reliably brought water into Rio and fed several fountains. However, this did not mean that water was delivered equitably. A close examination of the map on the right, which shows the aqueduct and its fountains throughout the high colonial era, shows that fountains were heavily concentrated near the Carioca Aqueduct. This left other areas of the city with no public fountains. This meant that the fountains lay distant from most residents in the city. This limitation of the built infrastructure created the reliance on enslaved (or imprisoned) water carriers. Hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of water carriers trudged the streets daily with heavy jugs on their heads.
When the royal court arrived in Rio in 1808, the Prince Regent ordered a map of the city to be drawn up. This was the first map printed in Brazil, and it came off the royal press that was founded after the court took up residence in Rio. It took four years for the map to be created and engraved by Paulo dos Santos Fereira Souto, under the direction of João Caetano de Rivara, using the map executed by J. A. dos Reis, cartographer.
The Prince Regent ordered a second aqueduct, to bring water from the headwaters of the Maracanã River. Plans for this aqueduct were already under discussion, and the presence of the royal court undoubtedly sped up the process of engineering the new aqueduct.
The route of the Maracanã, like that of the Carioca Aqueduct, descended via gravity flow around the hills and into the city. It began to deliver water to a fountain erected in the Campo de Santana in 1818.
J. A. Reis, J. C. Rivara, Planta da Cidade de São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro levantada por ordem de S. A. R. o Principe Regente Nosso Senhor no anno de 1808 Feliz e Memorável época da sua chegada a dita cidade. Biblioteca Nacional, Brasil.
Who had access to good, fresh water during the high colonial period? Convents and monasteries had their wells, the wealthy had domestic servants who had the daily chore of getting water, and sea captains seemed to have been able to refill their water casks.
What about the free poor and the enslaved? Were their minimal needs for water met? Water was free, but it took time to get it. Distances were far. The free poor had to compete with the water carriers at the city's fountains, and it may be that they settled instead for water that was poorer in quality, such as from shallow wells or springs.
How the enslaved got their water is still unclear. Since the enslaved carried so much water, they could drink all they wanted, but they could not easily enjoy water. Nor is it clear that they could carry water to their own families or to use it for their own cooking and personal bathing.
Thus, although more water was coming into the city through the patronage of the Crown and Viceroys in the high colonial period, water was not equitably distributed. This infrastructure delivered excellent water, but once the water reached the fountains, the city relied on human water carriers. This process was exploitative and inequitable. Wellbeing could not be achieved for the whole city.
Post Colonial, 1823-1889
Following the defeat of Napoleon, Dom João VI, who had arrived in Rio in 1808 as Prince Regent, and who, after the death of his mother, the Queen, had been crowned in Rio in 1816, returned to Portugal. He left behind his son, Pedro, who declared the independence of Brazil in 1822. At this moment, the capital of the new empire inherited the colonial water infrastructure. After independence, the newly crowned emperor and his son Pedro II, as well as city leaders, sought to improve access to clean water and to install sanitary sewage disposal. Water infrastructure improved throughout the nineteenth century. However, new projects built on or extended the existing water infrastructure. New storage tanks, called reservatórios, and newly channeled springs, for example, increased the flow of the aqueducts. Other well-established patterns, such as relying on enslaved water carriers, also continued. The uneven access to water in the city did not change.
As noted above, when the royal court arrived in Rio in 1808, the Prince Regent ordered a map of the city to be drawn up. He also ordered a second aqueduct to increase the amount of water flowing into the city. The map ordered by the Prince was published in 1817, and shown georeferenced on the right, it conveys how, the new aqueduct, like the Carioca Aqueduct before it, descended down and around the hills, via gravity flow, into the city. The Maracanã Aqueduct began to deliver water to the fountain in the Campo de Santana in 1818.
More fountains followed, but how many and exactly where they were located in the city is not always easy to determine. Maps typically show only the important ones. On one such map, published in 1838, and shown on the right, it is difficult to find the fountains. However, because this very map was described in detail in a government report from the same year, more fountains can be identified. Using the description of the map, we learn that there were 16 fountains in the city.
All fountains that can be positively located are plotted on our map of Rio circa 1840. As the map shows, most fountains were fed by the Maracanã and Carioca Aqueducts or by feeders that came from these aqueducts.
Fears of water shortages were constant, especially during times of drought. Because the city was expanding rapidly, the watersheds faced greater risks. Small farmers, charcoal burners, and coffee fazendeiros (planters) had begun to cut and burn the forest canopy. Seeing the danger to the city's water supply, laws were passed to protect the forests surrounding the city.
Although the number of public fountains serving the city residents was increasing, some parishes still did not receive the water from the aqueducts. The Parish of Santa Rita, for example, did not have a single fountain, and some large parishes only had one. A trade in water delivered by carts, known as carroças began, especially in these distant parishes. This created a market for independent water sellers.
From a city almanac, it is possible to see that city leaders were well aware of how much water was coming into the city and how it was distributed. This table shows the approximate calculation of water coming through public fountains over twenty-four hours in 1838. The most important fountains (chafarizes) were:
- the Carioca
- the Largo do Paço
- the Campo de Santana
The almanac also revealed how much water was coming into each parish. In 1838, the parish of Santa Rita received no water at all, while the parish of São José received almost half of the water that reached the city. This table clearly shows awareness of the great inequality in access to water sixteen years after independence. When we calculate the gallons of water per person per twenty-four hours, the dramatic and consequential difference is obvious.
The massive Atlantic slave trade to Brazil ended in 1850, although slavery would not be abolished until 1888. After 1850, considerable improvements to the water supply were made. Periodic droughts led to measures to create small reservatórios, which would store water and filter it. By 1865, these small square tanks (visible as hexagons on the map on the right) had been built throughout out the city and its nearby hills. These were deep tanks, like modern swimming pools. Also, after 1850, the Maracanã Aqueduct was straightened and rebuilt using cast iron pipes that allowed its waters to flow underground. Buried pipes also began to be laid to deliver water through the central city core.
Still, these measures could not protect the city in times of drought.
By the 1870s, Rio had forty-one fountains (shown on the map as triangles) and many reservoirs (shown as squares on the map. The population of each parish is shown by a color ramp, with lighter colors indicating less populated, and darker colors the more populous parishes.
In 1878, the imperial government signed a contract with a British impresario to create an entire new aqueduct. The new sources of water lay well beyond the city, in the mountains of the Serra do Tingua. In order to build the aqueduct, a train line had to be opened to carry the iron pipes, cast in England, as well as other materials to the new watershed.
It was a huge project that promised to dramatically improve access to fresh clean water to the central urban core of Rio. It was estimated that:
- the Rio d'Ouro and the Santo Antonio sources would provide 20 million liters of water
- the São Pedro 70 million
- other streams 10 million
- in all 100 million new liters of water for Rio
But, as the colored sections of the map show, Rio was a substantial municipal district, and all this water went to the traditional city center. Other outlying districts continued to have poor access to water.
The inauguration of the new water works in the Serra do Tingua took place in 1885. Shown at right is the Rio d'Ouro Reservoir, photographed by Marc Ferrez, at its inauguration. The reservoir is still in operation and still supplies water to some areas of greater Rio, as can be seen in the photograph of the same location taken by the author in 2017.
Only a few years after the massive new waterworks began to flow, slavery was abolished (1888), and the very next year, 1889, the empire fell.
Therefore, in the post-colonial era, the supply of water continuously improved, but that did not mean that equal access to water was achieved for all residents of Rio. Because the population of Rio continued to grow, there was a constant, increasing need for ever more water. Moreover, the city covered a huge geographical area. It remained difficult to distribute water to all areas of the growing city.
Closing Thoughts
What this study of water and wellbeing in Rio de Janeiro reveals is an underappreciated yet significant legacy from colonial times: the built water infrastructure. Because that water infrastructure had been designed and constructed in a slave society, it relied on forced labor at every level. It also relied on the assumption, maintained through the acceptance of slavery, that wellbeing would be attainable for some but not for all. This legacy continues. Rio still struggles with its water infrastructure and with equal distribution of good water for all.
Biblioteca Nacional, Brasil
Acknowledgements: Special thanks to Liufei Zhu and Bruno Sousa for their guidance and expertise with the maps, to Christina Zhou for the diagrams of fountains, and to Joan Burton for help with the translations of the Latin inscriptions on the fountains.
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