Christ the Redeemer, Rio de Janeiro

Nine years up a mountain

The statue was conceived to mark a century of Brazilian independence and built between 1922 and 1931 on the 700-metre granite peak of Corcovado, overlooking Rio.

It was designed by the Brazilian engineer Heitor da Silva Costa, with the figure modelled by the French-Polish sculptor Paul Landowski. The finished statue stands about 30 metres tall on an 8-metre pedestal, arms spread 28 metres wide.

Concrete and soapstone

Christ the Redeemer is built of reinforced concrete and faced with a skin of thousands of small triangular tiles of pale soapstone, a soft, durable stone chosen to weather the mountain's wind and rain.

Applying the tiles was painstaking work, and by tradition many local people, including women who wrote prayers and names on the backs of the tiles, helped lay them. Everything (concrete, stone, workers) was hauled up the steep slope on the cog railway that had climbed Corcovado since the 1880s.

The emblem of a city

Unveiled in October 1931, the statue quickly became the symbol of Rio de Janeiro and of Brazil itself, arms open above the city and the bay.

In 2007 it was named one of the New Seven Wonders of the World, and it remains one of the most visited monuments in the Southern Hemisphere: a modern landmark that, like the ancient wonders, was built to be seen from far off and never forgotten.