Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is one of fourteen destinations featured on Waddles' World Tour, RestMap's free daily 5-letter word puzzle. Each week's puzzles are themed around a different city, and every solve unlocks an authored travel fact about the place. The Christ the Redeemer anchors the Rio de Janeiro week. Below are five sourced facts that turn up across the Rio de Janeiro puzzle set.
The Tijuca Forest in Rio is the world's largest urban forest at 32 square kilometers, and it's entirely hand-planted. Between 1861 and 1887, six enslaved workers named Eleuterio, Constantino, Manuel, Mateus, Leopoldo, and Maria planted over 100,000 trees to restore land previously cleared for coffee plantations.
Source: Wikipedia Tijuca National Park, Earth Island JournalRio is the only city outside of Europe that ever served as the capital of a European kingdom. When Napoleon invaded Portugal in 1808, King Joao VI relocated the entire Portuguese royal court to Rio, making it the capital of the Portuguese Empire until 1821.
Source: riodejaneirobycariocas.com, SmithsonianThe replanted Tijuca Forest is so dense that scientists estimate it lowers ambient temperatures in surrounding Rio neighborhoods by up to 9 degrees Celsius, acting as a massive natural air conditioner for the city.
Source: Discover Walks Blog, Tijuca National Park WikipediaThe Maracana Stadium in Rio hosted the football match with the largest verified attendance in history: the 1950 World Cup final between Brazil and Uruguay drew 199,854 spectators — a record that will almost certainly never be broken due to modern safety regulations.
Source: Smithsonian, funworldfacts.comDuring colonial-era Rio, human waste was carried through the streets at night in wooden casks and clay vessels by enslaved people called 'tigres' (tigers) — named because the caustic waste that splashed on their skin left stripe-like chemical burns.
Source: ABES Sanitation History, PubMed historical analysis