Rio sobre Rochas

To think of the city from its waters is to assume that, beneath the concrete and infrastructures, another geography pulses—invisibilized, but still alive. Rio de Janeiro is a city made of waters—visible or hidden, strong or soft—that flow down the slopes, cross valleys, and shape the relief before flooding the plains and reaching the sea. The city's rivers, many of which are forgotten under the asphalt or imprisoned in canalizations, are witnesses to the hydric functioning of the urban site upon which the city grew. The “river of asphalt and people overflows the hills, clogs the curb” building a city over the flow of waters that shaped their own paths, fertilized lowlands, and diluted the salinity of the bodies of water dammed on our coast. The Carioca rivers are born in the mountain massifs of Tijuca, Pedra Branca, Gericinó-Mendanha. Crystalline and pollution-free in the midst of the protected forests that maintain moisture and feed our springs, they are still small springs of water that sprout from the rocks and descend in the form of streams, brooks, and larger rivers. In the Maciço da Tijuca, for example, the waterfalls are refreshing features and of appreciation for centuries. Cascatinha Taunay, the Horto Waterfalls, the Cascata Cristalina are places of refuge in the midst of the concrete mass of the built city, where the sound of falling water reenacts a geography that insists on being heard. These waters also feed rivers like the Maracanã, the Trapicheiros, the Joana, and so many others that, although buried in much of their courses, still remain alive, flowing beneath the city, like veins of an urban body that refuses to dry up. In the West Zone, the Maciço da Pedra Branca gives rise to rivers like the Grande, the Camorim, and the Anil, which run through floodable plains before emptying into the lagoons of Jacarepaguá and da Tijuca. They are watercourses that witness the territorial disputes of the “Carioca backcountry” of mills, agriculture, and intense urbanization. All respond to the rainy seasons, overflowing and reminding that the city, despite everything, is still embedded in tropical hydrographic basins. In Gericinó-Mendanha, the smaller rivers hide beautiful waterfalls in territories, historically, further from the city, and, certainly, because of that, marked by contrasts. The less intense use of their slopes preserved excellent forest remnants, now protected, but soon at their foot, the waters encounter lowlands that face the expansion of urban peripheries, their histories and social challenges. The valleys open and the hydrological flows reach the lowlands, meandering the rivers or creating extensive wetlands. However, upon leaving the waterfall-strewn stretches within the massifs, they encounter the city, which decided at the beginning of the 20th century to eliminate the many curves that its meanders drew through the lowlands, replacing them with straightened channels, with the purpose of quickly drying out the low areas, targeted for occupation. The city's hydrographic basins, therefore, spread like networks of memory. Many were straightened, canalized, drained, forgotten. Others resist. Thus, almost all the municipality's rivers, except those within areas protected by legislation, lost their curves and run straight in their lower courses and, naturally (I like the use of that word for artificializations), due to the lack of sanitation, are highly polluted. The waterfalls and rivers of Rio de Janeiro are not just natural accidents: they are structuring elements of the landscape and of history. They are places of ecological persistence and social memory. On their banks, communities were formed, boundaries were drawn, trajectories of urban expansion were defined. In their flows, even today, ancestral memories, hydrological functionalities, and the living behavior of the tropical climate run. Rivers that, in other times, were sources of life, leisure, navigation, agriculture. Today, they carry trash and sewage, but also possibilities of re-existence. Revitalization and environmental education projects attempt to return meaning and presence to these invisibilized liquid bodies. To think about the rivers and waterfalls of Rio de Janeiro is to reclaim the link between the current urban and the functioning of the landscapes before occupation, between the visible and the hidden, between the concrete and the fluid. It is to understand that the city is not only built on firm land, but also on flows—of water, of life, and of time. It is to rediscover, finally, the liquid geography that inhabits beneath our feet, flows through our hills, and that insists, despite everything, in reminding us that landscapes to perceive still resist.