On March 1 2011, the revitalisation works of the port territory opened up a peace of earth which had been buried for many years in the rua Barao de Tefe: the Cais do Valongo, or Valongo Wharf, with its colonial-style paving, made up of cobblestones on bare earth.
The irregular pebbles covered another layer, more in the Imperial Brazil style, of blocks of granite stacked together to receive, in 1843, the Empress Teresa Cristina, then the future wife of Dom Pedro II.
Above this covering, there was an embankment planned by the mayor Pereira Passos at the beginning of the 20th century, that put an end to reminders of the imperial past. It also hid what has been described as the original Brazilian holocaust.
Valongo Wharf was the largest slave port in the Americas and, according to the historian Manolo Florentino, was active in the last decades of the 18th century until the end of 1830. More than 700,000 slaves disembarked there, coming mostly from the Congo and Angola. Valongo was the point of convergence of 7% of all of the roughly 10.7 million slaves trafficked to our continent. At least 700,000 more were trafficked to other points along the Brazilian coast.