Who ruled Rio de Janeiro?

Rio de Janeiro lies on the western shore of Guanabara Bay in south-eastern Brazil, a huge sheltered harbour framed by granite peaks, forested hills and ocean beaches. Portuguese sailors reached the bay on 1 January 1502 and, using "river" loosely for any great body of water, called it the River of January. The bay's defensible anchorage and its later role as the port for the gold of Minas Gerais made Rio the capital of colonial Brazil, then, uniquely, the seat of a European monarchy, and for nearly two centuries the capital of the Brazilian state.

Before Europeans arrived, the bay's shores were home to Tupi-speaking peoples, notably the Tupinambá, also known as the Tamoio, who lived in fortified villages and fished and farmed manioc. French traders seeking brazilwood made alliances with them, and in 1555 a French expedition under Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon built a fort on an island in the bay as the centre of a colony called France Antarctique. The Portuguese attacked it in 1560, and on 1 March 1565 Estácio de Sá founded the city of São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro near the mouth of the bay. By 1567 the French and their Tamoio allies had been defeated, and the town was moved to a nearby hill.

For more than a century Rio was a modest sugar port of the Portuguese Empire, much smaller than Salvador, the colonial capital. The discovery of gold and later diamonds in the interior from the 1690s changed that, since Rio was the nearest good harbour to the mines. French privateers under René Duguay-Trouin seized the city in 1711 and held it for ransom. As the gold trade grew, the Portuguese moved the capital of colonial Brazil from Salvador to Rio in 1763. Its port also became one of the largest entry points for enslaved Africans in the Americas through the Atlantic slave trade; the Valongo Wharf alone received hundreds of thousands of captives in the early nineteenth century.

In 1808, fleeing Napoleon's invasion of Portugal, the Portuguese prince regent, later King João VI, and his court crossed the Atlantic and settled in Rio, which became the seat of the whole Portuguese monarchy. The court opened the ports to foreign trade and founded a botanical garden, a royal library, an academy of fine arts and a bank. When João returned to Lisbon in 1821, his son Pedro stayed behind, declared Brazil's independence in 1822 and made Rio the capital of the Empire of Brazil. The Golden Law abolishing slavery was signed in the city on 13 May 1888, and the following year a military coup there ended the monarchy and proclaimed a republic.

In the early twentieth century, under Mayor Francisco Pereira Passos, broad avenues were cut through the colonial centre, while campaigns against yellow fever and smallpox sparked a revolt against compulsory vaccination in 1904. Poorer residents pushed out of the centre settled on the hillsides, in the first favelas. New tunnels opened the Atlantic beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema to building, and the statue of Christ the Redeemer was completed on Corcovado in 1931. The national capital moved to the new city of Brasília on 21 April 1960, and in 1975 Rio was merged into the surrounding state of Rio de Janeiro, of which it remains the capital. With about six million people in the city and more than twelve million in its metropolitan area, it is the second-largest city in Brazil and its main centre of tourism, media and culture.