Carioca

"Karioca" was the first community that could be reached by boats entering Guanabara Bay, as well as being the most famous "taba" (indigenous village) nowadays. With its "Portuguesified" spelling, its name came to designate the people of the entire city of Rio de Janeiro.

Image description: The image is an old engraving depicting a map. On the left, it shows the ocean with several islands and ships floating. In the center, there is a landmass bordered by rivers and mountains. On the right is the edge of the ocean with more islands and ships. The map is marked with place names and distances in numbers. An orange circle highlights a specific area in the center-right of the map.

Before the European invasion, the Tupinambás suffered attacks from other indigenous peoples of the coast, who arrived in fleets of canoes through the entrance of the bay. The Karió-oca was one of the most important villages within the indigenous community originally from Rio de Janeiro. Also called Carijó-oca, it was responsible for the first line of defense and for warning other localities of relatives in the bay and inland. At the signal of danger or invasion of the bay, swift warriors would set off from there, running along the trails. Other villages were mobilized in response to the attacks, which they certainly suffered many times over more than 1500 years.

Image description: The image is a black-and-white engraving. At the top, it reads "DE L'AMERIQUE." The scene shows four human figures. On the left side, there are two seated women, looking to the right. At the top, a man stands, holding a long, curved object with both hands. He is looking downward. At the bottom, there is another female figure lying down, with her arms raised.

Guanabara Bay was a veritable Tupinambá city: historical sources of French or Portuguese origin record more than eighty tabas and communities. In both sixteenth-century lists of tabas authored by Jean de Léry, “Kariók” is identified as the first taba "on the left side of the bay," which places the community very close to the main axis of what is now the Carioca River, occupying the stretch of land that today runs from Glória to the neighborhood of Flamengo, on some plateau rising up against the hills of that region.

Image description: The image is an old engraving depicting a map. It is in black and white. At the top, there is a title mentioning "La France Antarctique" and "Le Rio Janeiro." Below the title, there is a distance scale and a compass. The map shows a coastal area with several locations marked by names in French. On the right, there is a reference to "Mer du Brésil." At the center, the "Fort de Coligny" stands out, and around it, several other geographic points are identified. At the bottom, the Tropique de Capricorne is shown.

The meaning of the term "carioca" — mistakenly taught in schools as "house of the white man" — is explained in Léry's account, dated 1574:

“In this village, so named,/ it can be interpreted as: house of the kariós; composed of the word kariós (carijós) and ók (oca), which means house. Removing the ‘os’ (from kariós) and adding ók, we get kariók(a)”.

Another irrefutable confirmation of the origin of “carioca” is corroborated by the Jesuit José de Anchieta, one of the most active architects of the founding of Rio de Janeiro (1565). In Auto de São Lourenço, a liturgical play written in 1583, Anchieta firmly and confidently names the villages defeated by the Portuguese in the sixteenth-century battles of Guanabara. The “Carijó-oca” village appears right among the first ones.