Taken by Augusto Malta around 1907, possibly from the Igreja Nossa Senhora do Monte do Carmo.
From the sixteenth century until the mid-1770s, with the construction of the Cais do Valongo in the north of the city centre, this square was the main arrival point of African slaves in the city. They were followed, in 1808, by the Portuguese royal family, who fled to Brazil from Portugal, outrunning Napoleon’s troops.
With the death of Queen Maria I, in 1816, the funeral procession, starting here on the square, was the only time a royal funeral has been performed in the Americas.
In 1870, the cit council changed the name of the square to Praça de Dom Pedro II. However, with the Proclamation of the Republic of Brazil on November 15, 1889, the name was changed to its current name, in honor of the date of the proclamation.
The man on the horse is General Osorio, a war hero from the Paraguayan war, which ran from 1864 to 1870. The statue was made from bronze, itself from guns seized in Paraguay during the war. Osorio was buried under the statue, but in the late twentieth century, his remains were moved to Porto Alegre, the capital of his home state.
Augusto Malta
Born in 1864, Augusto César Malta de Campos was one of Brazil’s most important photographers at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, with most of his work covering the District Federal, that is, Rio de Janeiro.
Malta was born in Alagoas, in the far north-east of Brazil, and moved to Rio in 1888, when the city was still home to the Imperial Court. After declaration of The Republic, he joined the Municipal Guard between 1889 and 1893. Then, trying his hand, without much success, as a bookkeeper, a dry goods and fine cloth merchant, he found in photography the vocation that would make him famous as the most expressive visual chronicler of the massive changes at the start of the 20th century in the then-capital of Brazil.
In 1903, Malta was introduced to the then mayor, Pereira Passos, who appointed him “Official Photographer of the General Directorate of Works and Roads of the Municipal Authority of the Federal District”, becoming responsible for the official image of the modernisation of Rio de Janeiro. In 1904, he was the founding member of the Sociedade Cartophila Internacional Emanuel Hermann, which selected images for distribution as post cards. Later, in 1908, in one of Malta’s greatest photo reports, he accompanied a group of a few hundred American sailors disembarking in Rio, recording their visit to the city’s red-light districts.
Malta passed away in 1957. Some 27000 of his photos reside at the Instituto Moreira Salles.
Take a picture in the very same place!