Calabouço was created during the administration of viceroy Luis de Vasconcelos e Souza (1779-1790), when it was located in a military installation on Santa Luzia beach, close to the Army’s War Arsenal, until 1813, when it was moved to the top of nearby Castelo Hill, where there had already been a slave prison in the Casa de Câmara e Cadeia since 1693. At the end of the 1840s, Calabouço was transferred to the Casa de Correção, in Mangue, where it remained until its closure in 1874.
Calabouço served as a detention center for runaway slaves, but the majority of detainees, around two hundred on average, were sent there by their owners to discipline them. The prison authorities charged the owners a rate for every hundred lashes and for food. Calabouço also received slaves caught practicing capoeira by urban patrols. With the destruction of Castelo Hill in 1924, all vestiges of the old buildings were also erased. However, the region still contains Misericórdia Square, the first square in Rio de Janeiro, where you can find the Ladeira de Misericórida, one of the access roads to the top of the hill. Images: Augusto Earle, Thomas Ender, s/r.
“The sanitary conditions of the old Calabouço were horrifying. In the unventilated rooms, the heat and stench made the situation even worse. The prisoners also suffered from a lack of food…” (Holloway, p. 257). “Different slaves ended up in the Calabouço prison, and those who were caught practicing capoeira, some armed, some of which had already left, and others who remained and were about to be punished […]” (“Parte” from Polícia de 1835, cited in: SOARES, Carlos Eugênio Líbano, A capoeira escrava e outras tradições rebeldes no Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1850, Campinas : Editora da Unicamp, 2001. p. 104).