Open your eyes wide, for this secret is not recorded anywhere.
Here in this place existed the Gamboa Lazareto, where slaves who arrived sick during the long sea crossing, which lasted up to 60 days, were interned or quarantined.
Imagine a neglected building, where blacks were cared for by nurses. Here, they arrived weak, with skin diseases and distended bellies, famished. Many had smallpox, or “bixiga,” a contagious infirmity, but they also suffered from dysentery, measles, scurvy, and ophthalmia.
Those that survived went to a far worse place: the slave markets of Valongo. The others went to the Cemetery of the New Blacks.
In the beginning of the 19th century, a permit required slaves to be treated before being sold, “feeding them with fresh food, making them wash, dress in new clothes, and observe for a certain time wounds which tend to become infected,” writes a health provider in Rio. In 1811, he proposed the construction of a new Lazareto to three major slave traders, João Gomes Valle, José Luis Alves, and João Alves de Souza Guimarães. In trade, for each slave interned there, he would receive a fee of 400 réis from the traders, according to historian Júlio César Medeiros da Silva Pereira.
The old Lazareto was located on an island in Guanabara Bay, but the traders complained of the hassle of transporting them to Valongo.
It is likely that there were other Lazaretos in Rio. Beyond this, some businessmen made a living by curing and re-selling very sick slaves, who were referred to as “refuse.”
According to the project Passados Presentes and historian Claudio Honorato, the land of the Gamboa Lazareto was behind the Monte da Saúde, and today can be seen from the top of Propósito street. Today the building no longer exists, but the land belongs to Brazil’s Central Bank.