Carioca Sunshine: Urca

On Sunday afternoon I decided to head to Urca, a neighborhood on the far side of Copacabana. I had no particular destination in mind, but my Rio guidebook has a walking tour of Urca in it, so I jotted down the route and set off to see what there was to see. Urca is the neighborhood where Sugarloaf, one of Rio’s famous landmarks, is located, but apart from that, it doesn’t have much in the way of tourist attractions. Most of the neighborhood is residential, and it’s supposedly very safe. Urca sits on the Bay of Guanabara, and one of the neighborhood’s busiest streets follows a path right along the water for quite a long ways. There’s a wall separating the sidewalk from the water, and all along it were people fishing or just enjoying the view while talking and eating with friends. It was shaded for the most part and there was a nice breeze, so it was a very pleasant afternoon stroll.

Urca has a little beach on the bay. The beach itself is not at all spectacular, but the backdrop behind it is beautiful, with mountains jutting up only a little ways back from the water. The bay is really polluted and everything always strongly advises against swimming at any of the bay beaches, but Brazilians apparently don’t mind it since there were lots of people in the water.

A hidden oasis nestled among busier neighborhoods, Urca is so much quieter than the parts of Rio with which I’m most familiar. It reminded me of lazy summer days in my hometown, with only the occasional car zipping by. The street along the bay had a decent number of cars, but the streets further inland had hardly any traffic whatsoever. I even stood in the middle of the street to take several pictures, something that’s all but impossible most other places.

As I was walking around, I almost concluded that if I were to come back to live in Rio again at some point (which isn’t a particularly unlikely possibility), I’d like to live in Urca. I love how while the neighborhood itself is so peaceful, it’s still only a bus ride away from any of the busier parts of Rio. It seemed so safe there, and at times it was hard to remember that I was still right in the middle of one of Brazil’s biggest cities. I also love the path along the bay, to which almost every street in Urca seems to lead. While it doesn’t have quite the splendor of the ocean beaches, the view of the bay is still quite lovely. In some ways, it’s almost better because there’s so much more to see: the waves lapping against the rocks directly below the path, the mountains, Rio’s skyscrapers, boats on the water, the huge Rio-Niterói bridge, and the neighboring city of Niterói, across the water on the other side of the bay. It’s more visually stimulating, since the view of the ocean beaches is simply of a huge expanse of blue, with waves along the coast and a few islands in the distance. I suppose it’s just a difference between the mostly manmade beauty of the bay and the natural beauty of the ocean. They’re beautiful in different ways, and it’s hard to choose which is better.

In the end, however, I decided that I don’t think Urca is quite the place for me. I realized later that the entire time I was walking around, I didn’t see a single drugstore or supermarket. This is in direct contrast to Gávea and Leblon, where there are drugstores on almost every block and at least four supermarkets within walking distance of my apartment. There are also lots of Lojas Americanas (a chain that’s sort of like a Brazilian-style Wal-Mart) around, so I can get almost everything I need within a few blocks of my apartment. I really like how convenient it is to be able to run to the nearest supermarket/drugstore/Lojas Americanas, get whatever I need, and still be back to my apartment in ten minutes. After enjoying this luxury, I think I’d find it a hassle to have to board a bus or walk long distances to get whatever I needed if I lived in Urca. In the US, driving distances to get necessities is the norm, of course, but in Brazil, it’d be quite a change from what I’m used to. In my opinion, Urca is better suited for Sunday afternoon strolls than it is for permanent residence.