Christ the Redeemer
— — arms wide, as the cloud comes through.
Not only on a wall.
“The statue sits 710 metres above Rio, on the granite back of Corcovado. Most mornings the clouds arrive at the elbows before they reach the city. The cog train climbs out of Cosme Velho through the Tijuca forest; people get quiet on the last switchback. From the platform the bay opens, and the figure above is smaller than expected and stiller than expected.
Christ the Redeemer, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Cristo Redentor stands on the summit of Corcovado, a 710-metre granite peak inside Tijuca National Park, the urban forest that wraps the western half of Rio de Janeiro. The figure is 30 metres tall on an 8-metre pedestal, with arms spanning 28 metres. Designed by Heitor da Silva Costa with sculptor Paul Landowski, it was inaugurated on 12 October 1931 after nine years of work. The exterior is faced in pale soapstone quarried near Ouro Preto in Minas Gerais, chosen for weather resistance.
The surface is not concrete or marble but soapstone, small triangular tiles of the same Minas Gerais talc-rich rock used for colonial church carvings. Workers and volunteers cut the tiles by hand and pasted them onto the reinforced-concrete frame across the 1920s. The pale grey absorbs sea light gently, which is why the figure reads as a single carved object from the Copacabana shoreline rather than a panelled monument. A 2010 restoration replaced fungus-stained tiles using stone from the original quarry near Carrancas.
Most visitors reach the summit by the Trem do Corcovado, a cog railway running from Cosme Velho since 1884, the line that delivered the original construction materials. The trip up takes about twenty minutes through second-growth Tijuca forest. Authorised vans from Paineiras and Copacabana are the other approved routes; private cars stop at the lower gate. The monument opens daily at 8:00 and crowds peak between 11:00 and 14:00. Cloud cover at the platform is common in summer.