In early 16th century, Portuguese explorers who sailed along the coast line of Brazil’s coast they kept the track of their discoveries and they given those names by names of days to mention them. On very 1st day of year 1502 they moved smoothly toward a narrow opening in the coastline, guarded by fabulously shaped mountains. Behind this entrance lay a body of water stretching 20 miles inland. When they realized that they had reached to the mouth of a great river they named the Area River of the First of January.
Actually that was not the river it was an island-studded bay that the Tamoio people had long before named Guanabara, which means, “arm of the sea”.
Even now after centuries passed its both native and European names persist. There is only one thing changed that’s now instead of caravels and dugouts, supertankers and yachts glide across the magnificent balloon-shaped harbor of Guanabara Bay. On the western shore of the bay there is the capital city named as Rio de Janeiro means the River of January.
It looked like a river that was one of the false impressions, which that Rio held. It was given so many named as Europeans called it a smaller bay of Botafago, under Sugarloaf, a “lake” and the Tamoio named it Guanabara Bay’s eastern edge Niteroi, that means hidden waters.
For early European voyagers while sailing when Rio came in to view the curtain rose on a stage set with such strange striking shapes and forms that virtually everything looked like something else.
At the entrance of the Bay there is a naked and lopsided mountain the Portuguese called Pao de Acucar evoked the sugarloaves fashioned on the island of Madeira.The highest mountain is called Corcovado that mean “the hunchback” for its humped appearance. Now on that 2,300 foot High Mountain’s peak statue of Christ is placed.
The vastness of bay is getting smaller Though there are efforts made keep sustain its vastness as in the 1920 1st and then in 1960s small hills that once had been home to Rio’s earliest settlers were sluiced through pipes to create bay fill.
Now the new land is having an airport, a six-lane highway, parkland and beaches, the city’s modern museum and other 20th century landmarks as Rio looks to its great bay for elbowroom.
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