Selarón Steps

Where it sits. The Selarón Steps climb the hillside between the bohemian district of Lapa and the hilltop neighbourhood of Santa Teresa in central Rio de Janeiro, linking Rua Joaquim Silva at the bottom to Rua Pinto Martins at the top. There are 215 steps over about 125 metres of ascent, running in a straight, steep flight between tall painted houses that funnel the light. From the base you are two minutes from the Arcos da Lapa, the white 18th-century aqueduct arches that carry the Santa Teresa tram, and a few minutes more from the conical Metropolitan Cathedral. Every surface of the stairway — risers, treads, side walls, the low parapets — is covered in ceramic tile, so densely that the concrete beneath is nowhere visible.

The story behind it. The stairway was the life's work of one man. Jorge Selarón, born in Chile in 1947, arrived in Brazil after years of wandering and settled in a house beside these steps in the late 1980s. In 1990 he began tiling the crumbling staircase outside his door, at first with fragments salvaged from building sites and rubbish across the city, using blue, green and yellow — the colours of the Brazilian flag — as his base palette. Neighbours thought him mad. He funded the work by selling paintings, most of them variations on a single image of a pregnant African woman, and as the stairway became known, visitors began bringing him tiles from home. By the end he had used more than 2,000 of them, from over 60 countries, and he described the project as "my tribute to the Brazilian people".

An unfinished, deliberately unstable work. Selarón insisted the staircase would never be complete and that he would only stop when he died, and he continually replaced tiles rather than preserving them, so the composition changed constantly. That instability is the point: photographs taken a decade apart show different walls. The city recognised the stairway as a cultural heritage landmark in 2005. On 10 January 2013 Selarón was found dead on his own steps, at 65; the circumstances were investigated and remain a subject of local argument. Since then the work has been maintained rather than extended, which has fixed in place a mosaic that its author never intended to fix.

On screen. The steps have appeared far more often than most visitors realise, usually as a two-second signifier for Rio. U2 shot part of a music video here, and the Snoop Dogg and Pharrell Williams track Beautiful, filmed in Rio in 2003, used the stairway and the surrounding Lapa streets. They have carried advertising campaigns, fashion shoots, travel programming and Olympic broadcast segments in 2016, and they are one of the most-tagged locations in the city on social platforms. The reason is simple compositional luck: the flight is narrow and straight, so a camera low on the steps compresses hundreds of tiles into a single frame of saturated colour, with a human figure fitting neatly in the middle. It photographs better than it walks.

What you actually see today. Look closely and the stairway is a diary. There are hand-painted tiles Selarón made himself, including repeated self-portraits and the pregnant-woman motif; commercial souvenir tiles from Portugal, Mexico, Japan and Iran donated by travellers; football-club crests; university seals; a scattering of mirrors. The oldest sections near the bottom are the most heavily blue and yellow; higher up the palette breaks into reds. Vendors sell caipirinhas and prints at the base, musicians play on the lower steps in the afternoon, and there is a constant slow procession of people photographing each other. The house Selarón lived in stands beside the stairs, still recognisable.

Getting there and timing. Metro Line 1 to Cinelândia or Glória leaves a walk of about ten minutes; the Lapa arches are the obvious landmark to aim for. There is no admission charge and no gate — it is a public street stair, used by residents going home. Early morning, before about nine, gives clean light on the lower flight and space to actually see the tiles; by midday tour groups fill it. The steps are steep, uneven and without a handrail for most of their length, which rules out wheelchair access and makes them awkward in the rain. The surrounding blocks are lively but require normal city awareness after dark, when Lapa's samba bars fill and the crowd changes character; a taxi at night is money well spent. Combining the stairway with the Santa Teresa tram, which climbs over the Lapa arches from the city centre to the hilltop, makes a natural half-day: up by tram, down by steps, ending among the bars beneath the aqueduct.