Since it was first built by war veterans in 1897, Morro da Providência has become a complex symbol of poverty, violence and sentimentality, fetishised in popular culture. But where do Rio’s favelas fit into Brazil’s vision for the Olympic Games?

Among Brazilian film buffs and cultural historians, the film Favela dos Meus Amores has gained cult-like status. Released in 1935, it chronicles the musical and amorous adventures of two young men who put on a cabaret for tourists in the Morro da Providência, the hill near the port area of Rio de Janeiro, which, 40 years earlier, had become Brazil’s first favela.

One of the men falls for the beautiful teacher Rosinha, muse of the local samba musicians – a character described in one contemporary review as “a rare flower, who preserves her beauty among those perverted people [of the favela]”.



The film no longer exists; all copies were either lost or destroyed. Its reputation rests partly on the mystique generated by this absence, and partly on the hugely enthusiastic critical reaction of the time.

Notably, while the lead actors were all professionals, most of the cast members and musicians came from Providência itself. The film could be said to mark the moment when the favela – previously a byword for criminality, sickness and moral depravity – started to become “chic”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Map of Rio de Janeiro, circa 1831. Illustration: Niday Picture Library/Alamy

To this day, Rio’s favelas exert a complex, dual influence on the city’s imagination: fetishised as seductive, authentic engines of popular culture and abhorred as ugly vectors of violence and disease – a counterpoint to the asfalto; the blander, safer dwelling places of the city’s more respectable denizens.



The Morro da Providência was first settled by veterans of the War of Canudos (1896-7). Tens of thousands of Cariocas (the name for Rio’s inhabitants derived from the indigenous Tupi word for “white man’s house”) were conscripted into the nascent Brazilian republic’s army. They were sent to the arid interior of the north-eastern state of Bahia, to destroy a group of settlers whose quixotic religious community was considered a threat to the new Brazilian state.



Before the war, many of the soldiers and their families had lived in filthy, overcrowded tenements in the centre of Rio, such as the Cabeça de Porco (the Pig’s Head) at the foot of Providência. After razing Canudos to the ground, at the cost of around 30,000 lives, the veterans returned to Rio expecting a reward. They were granted permission by the Ministry of War to occupy the hill itself, which was located between a quarry, the port and Rio’s main train station.

“During the war, the soldiers had camped at a place called Morro da Favela,” explains local historian Milton Teixeira. “The hill (morro) was named after a kind of oily plant that grows in that region.”

Starting near the foot of Providência hill, the former soldiers replicated the small, mud-brick houses they had built near Canudos – and the area soon became known as “favela”. “Those first settlers built a chapel, a prayer house and a water tank,” Teixeira says. “They stayed there and others soon followed.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rio de Janeiro’s harbour in 1860. The Providência favela was built on a hill near the port. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty

The opportunities for unskilled labourers in the area also attracted former slaves, many of whom had only been freed in 1888. With the government having given little thought as to how these newly liberated slaves would make a living, hundreds of thousands came from across Brazil to Rio, forming communities around the outskirts of what was then the capital of the republic.

Just three years later, the favela was already beginning to attract a bad reputation. In the 1998 book Um Século de Favela, the historians Alba Zaluar and Marcos Alvito published a letter from the national archives, dated 4 November 1900, in which a police officer complains to his superior about the difficultly in tackling crime in Providência:



“Policing is impossible in this area, rife with deserters, thieves and squaddies. There are no streets, the houses are all made of wood and covered in zinc, and there isn’t a single gas light on the whole hill.”



A letter published that same month in the “people’s complaints” section of the newspaper Jornal do Brasil expresses indignation about “a gang of minors” from the hill, stealing a pair of trousers on display in a shop window in Carioca Street.



As well as crime, the authorities fretted about disease. A cartoon published in 1904, during the height of a contentious campaign to eradicate smallpox, shows the celebrated Brazilian public health pioneer Oswaldo Cruz combing degenerate slum dwellers out of the lank hair of an ugly head labelled “favella”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cartoon showing Oswaldo Cruz combing slum dwellers out of Rio’s ‘ugly head’. Illustration: Oswaldo Cruz Monumenta Historica

It was not until 1913 that Providência received its first sympathetic treatment, with a series of paintings by Gustavo Dall’Ara. The carefree blonde washerwomen of his paintings appear to have started a new trend for representing the city’s favelas with an unrealistic sentimentality.



Throughout the first few decades of the 20th century, Providência was threatened with destruction. A formal request to raze the community came in 1927, in a design put forward by Alfred Agache – a French urban planner who worried about the residents’ “unlimited individual freedom” and the community’s impact on the city’s “social order and security”. His plan was never implemented.

Under the military dictatorship of the late 1960s and 70s, however, around 20% of all Rio’s favelas were razed, and their inhabitants transferred to distant public housing projects in the city’s west zone. Providência avoided that fate, but the community was badly shaken by a massive explosion at the quarry in 1968, which killed 36 people and destroyed the homes of many more.

Over the years, migrants from the north-east, driven out by the region’s relentless droughts and chronic underdevelopment, poured into Rio’s favelas. One of them was 13-year-old Juraci Gomes, who arrived in Providência with her parents in 1970.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Providência favela has never experienced significant redevelopment – and still doesn’t have a proper water supply. Photograph: Ricardo Moraes/AP

“There was no electricity at that time,” she recalls. “People used lanterns to light their houses. It wasn’t until the 1980s that some of the houses were connected [to the mains]; before that we bought energy posts and used to steal electricity.”

To this day, Providência lacks a proper municipal water supply and the residents rely on a network of pipes that illegally siphon off some of the city’s water. Only a few of the 5,000 or so families who live in the area are connected to a sewage system – yet the favela does boast a state-of-the-art cable car, built at a cost of R$75m (£14m) in 2014 as part of the Meu Porto Maravilha redevelopment project.

Like many residents, Gomes – known locally by the respected moniker Dona Jura – considers the cable car a mixed blessing, but she has taken advantage of its construction to relocate her bar to a viewing platform connected to the Américo Brum cable car station. “I have done a bit of everything to get by here,” she says. “But since my prawn and coconut milk gnocci won a gastronomy competition, I have lived by my cooking.”

Cosme Felippsen, 26, who has lived his entire life in Providência, argues that the cable car should never have been a priority. “We didn’t want the money spent on it. Basic sanitation would have been much more useful but, as always, the city didn’t bother to talk to us.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Providência’s cable car transports favela residents to the old city. Photograph: Antonio Scorza/AFP/Getty Images

Felippsen works as a street vendor and part-time Providência tour guide. Though he accepts that the cable car, which will eventually link the Central do Brasil train station to the new VLT tram in Gamboa, has brought a greater flow of tourists to the area, he says the project was hugely disruptive.

“Two hundred families were removed to make way for the cable car. If we hadn’t fought back, the city would have removed even more.” And while he thinks Rio’s impending Olympic Games “represents something good”, he argues that in practice, “these mega-events provide an excuse for the city to tear down houses.”

Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes, insists that the only demolitions directly attributable to the Olympics are the ones in Vila Autódromo, a favela on the edge of the new Olympic Park. However, by the city’s own figures, 22,059 families have been resettled since 2009 – either due to their homes being labelled “at risk”, or to make way for transport and other infrastructure projects scheduled for completion before the 2016 Games.



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In the middle of a severe recession and an ongoing political crisis, few of Providência’s residents see the games as something to celebrate. Some even fear that the cable car, which is currently free and is still looking for a long-term operator, may stop running after 2016.



Violence also remains an issue in the community, despite the installation of a police pacification unit, known as a UPP, in the favela in 2010. In early March, traffickers and police engaged in a three-hour shoot-out one night. No one was injured, but the battle has left bullet holes in the concrete pillars that support the cable car.



Felippsen, whose brother was killed by the police, acknowledges that violence in Providência has fallen since their arrival, but argues it has merely been displaced to other parts of the city. Relations between locals and the police remain extremely tense.



“From the very beginning, since the favela became the favela, us residents have seen the police as oppressors,” he says. “And there is never any dialogue between the oppressor and the oppressed.”



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