Favelas, Slums Of Rio: An Expedition Through Streets Of Brazil
Rio has long allured visitors to its splashy seaside resorts and colourful communities, from Ipanema to Copacabana. However, the spectators watching the Olympics this summer will hear a cultural term that describes other pockets of neighbourhoods surviving — and thriving — within Brazil's second-largest city: favela. Regardless of it being a Portuguese word that is related to criminal activities and penury, these informal working-class boonies are seeing a resurgence as well. Euclides da Cunha, a Brazillian author, once described a "mount Favela" in his work about Brazil's civil war of 1897. Soldiers had stationed on a hill where the thorny favela plant grew in the northeast region and made a temporary mess out of shacks. When some of the soldiers went back to Rio, they settled o...
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