Christ the Redeemer

FACTSFact sheet

01A seventy-year-old idea

The idea is older than the Republic. In the 1850s, the Lazarist priest Pedro Maria Boss imagined a religious monument on top of Corcovado. It never left the drawing board.

It came back in 1921, through the Catholic Circle of Rio de Janeiro, with a date in sight: the Centenary of Independence, in 1922. A petition with more than 20,000 signatures reached President Epitácio Pessoa, and the government granted the land. Still in 1922, the foundation stone was laid at the top of the mountain.

The main thing was still missing. Nobody knew yet what the statue would look like, nor how to get it up there.

02The first Christ did not open his arms

The design chosen, out of three, was that of the engineer Heitor da Silva Costa. And the first Christ he drew was not the one known today: it held a globe in one hand and a cross in the other.

That drawing was abandoned. In the final version, in Silva Costa's own words to the magazine O Cruzeiro, in 1931, the cross became the body of the statue, and the globe went beneath its feet.

Where did the open-armed pose come from? According to Silva Costa himself, from a radio antenna that Westinghouse installed on Corcovado in 1922. The painter Carlos Oswald worked on the drawings with him, and some attribute the pose to Oswald; that has never been demonstrated.

The choice had an enormous consequence. A statue with open arms on top of a peak is a statue with two cantilevered arms, facing the wind with nothing underneath.

03The problem was the place

Corcovado is a granite needle in the middle of the city. The top is some 700 m above the sea, and it is small. There was nowhere to set up a large building site.

There was a train. The Corcovado Railway, opened on 9 October 1884, climbs 3,824 m through the forest, and in 1910 it became Brazil's first electric railway. The building materials went up by it.

Up there, the workers worked on scaffolding over the precipice, without the protection that would be mandatory today, according to a 2021 report by Agência Brasil. The master builder, Heitor Levy, lived on top of the mountain throughout the five years of building work, from 1926 to 1931.

04Concrete, not bronze

A monument like this, in the 1920s, would have been made of bronze, of stone, or of sheet metal over an iron skeleton, like the Statue of Liberty. The Christ is none of these things: it is reinforced concrete, with a concrete plant set up on the summit itself.

Silva Costa called the material "the exponent of our age". The engineer Arrojado Lisboa wrote in 1931 that it was a solution applied for the first time to a monument of that nature.

In 1928, with the work under way, a technical commission replaced the planned metal framework with an internal reinforced-concrete truss. French sources attribute the calculations to the engineer Albert Caquot. According to Cimento Itambé, the statue rests on four central pillars, with a foundation 4 m into the rock.

Inside, the statue is hollow: 12 platforms connected by stairs, with exits in the arms and the head, for maintenance. From outside it looks like a solid sculpture. Inside, it is a building.

05The head came from Paris, in pieces

The form came out of a studio in France. Silva Costa met the sculptor Paul Landowski in Paris in May 1924, and the contract was signed in November. Landowski worked on ever larger models: one of 40 cm, another of 2.30 m and the final one, of 4 m, sent by ship to be enlarged in Brazil.

The head and the hands he made at full size, in plaster. The head is 3.75 m tall and weighs 30 t; each hand measures 3.20 m. Cut into blocks, they crossed the Atlantic in 1928. According to the Sanctuary, the head alone came in 50 numbered parts. Landowski's chronology records the head assembled on the summit on 10 June 1930.

Some sources attribute the face to the Romanian sculptor Gheorghe Leonida, from the studio. Landowski's official chronology does not mention him, and the attribution remains unconfirmed.

06A skin of triangles

The concrete does not show. The whole statue is clad in soapstone, and this skin is not made of slabs: it is made of triangles 3 cm on a side and 7 mm thick, glued onto strips of cloth that were then applied over the concrete.

According to the Archdiocese, Silva Costa took the idea from a mosaic-covered fountain in the Galerie des Arcades, on the Champs-Élysées, in Paris, in early 1927. The technique was tested the same year at Gentil & Bourdet, in Boulogne-Billancourt, France.

The triangles were glued by women volunteers. Some wrote, on the back of the pieces, the names of husbands, children and relatives, on the side that would face the concrete, according to the book by Maria Augusta Machado cited by Emerson Giumbelli. Whether any of those names is still there, after so many restorations, nobody knows: only by tearing out the stone could they be read.

How many triangles in all? Nobody counted. And inside there is another hidden piece: according to the Sanctuary, a soapstone heart measuring 1.30 m.

07The night of 12 October, and what came after

The Christ was inaugurated on 12 October 1931, with Cardinal Sebastião Leme and President Getúlio Vargas. The plan, arranged by Assis Chateaubriand, was to switch on the lights by a radio signal sent from Europe, with Guglielmo Marconi at the other end. What happened that night the sources do not tell the same way: some say the signal lit the statue; others, that bad weather prevented the transmission and the lights were switched on in Rio itself.

What is known for certain happened 50 years later: on 12 October 1981, Pope John Paul II switched on the Christ's lights by radio, from Castel Gandolfo, in Italy, and recalled Marconi in his speech.

The statue is struck by lightning a few times a year: about 6, according to INPE; 5, according to the Sanctuary. In 2014, a lightning bolt damaged a finger of the right hand. There were restorations in 1980, 1990, 2010 (when more than 60,000 stones were replaced) and from 2017 to 2021, with 3D scanning. In 2012, the Rio courts denied Landowski's heirs the rights to the image; the sculptor reportedly noted in his diary that he had given up the rights because there would be few reproductions.

In 2026, a hundred years after the work began, Corcovado is a building site again. According to ICMBio, the work, scheduled from August 2026 to May 2027, replaces the four escalators and installs two panoramic inclined elevators; during this period, capacity at the top is cut in half.

MYTHSWhat people say and what the record shows

• What people say

  Christ the Redeemer was a gift from France.

  What the record shows

  It was paid for with donations from Brazilian believers, in campaigns by the Archdiocese and the Catholic Circle; the government granted the land. What is French is the sculptor and the calculations attributed to Caquot.

• What people say

  Marconi switched on the statue's lights from Rome, in 1931.

  What the record shows

  The sources tell the story of that night in at least four different ways, and several say bad weather blocked the signal. What is proven is the switching-on by radio carried out by John Paul II, from Castel Gandolfo, in 1981.

• What people say

  The statue is covered by six million soapstone triangles.

  What the record shows

  No source supports the number, and the math does not add up: six million pieces of that size would cover an area much larger than the statue's. Nobody counted.

• What people say

  The monument was conceived to honor Princess Isabel.

  What the record shows

  There is no basis for this. When Father Boss had the idea, in the 1850s, Isabel was a little girl.

• What people say

  Nobody died during construction.

  What the record shows

  There is no record of any death, but the claim comes only from the Church and the master builder. It may be true; it is not proof.

QUESTIONSFrequently asked questions

Next episode · Structure 02 · premieres Oct 15, 2026

Empire State Building

Manhattan, New York, United States · 1930–1931

Putting up 86 floors of steel and stone in 410 days, in the middle of Manhattan, with work starting just months after the stock market crash of 1929.

Read the story →

SOURCESSources

1. Emerson Giumbelli, "A Modernidade do Cristo Redentor", Dados, v. 51, n. 1, 2008 — redalyc.org
2. Juliette Singer, chronology of the Christ of Rio, official website of Paul Landowski — paul-landowski.com
3. Christ the Redeemer Sanctuary, Archdiocese of Rio de Janeiro — santuariocristoredentor.com.br
4. Maria Augusta Machado, Cristo Redentor do Corcovado, Public Archive of the State of Rio de Janeiro, 1997 (cited by Giumbelli)
5. O Cruzeiro, 10 October 1931, texts by Heitor da Silva Costa and Arrojado Lisboa (cited by Giumbelli)
6. ICMBio / Tijuca National Park, accessibility works on Corcovado, 2026
7. Agência Brasil, report on the 90th anniversary of Christ the Redeemer, 2021
8. Cimento Itambé, on the structure of Christ the Redeemer, 2011
9. INPE/ELAT, lightning incidence on Christ the Redeemer

Images

• Fig. 01 — Christ the Redeemer on the summit of Corcovado, Rio de Janeiro, in 2014: Chensiyuan · CC BY-SA 4.0
• Fig. 02 — The statue inside the scaffolding, on top of Corcovado, around 1930–1931. In the background, Sugarloaf Mountain and the entrance to the bay: Acervo Instituto Moreira Salles (013RJ009013) · Public domain
• Fig. 03 — The Corcovado Railway on the Silvestre Viaduct. The building materials went up the mountain on these rails: Acervo Instituto Moreira Salles (013RJ009040) · Public domain
• Fig. 04 — The Christ seen from the foot of the pedestal, in an old photograph by Alfredo Krausz: Alfredo Krausz / Acervo Instituto Moreira Salles (002037AAK5039) · Public domain
• Fig. 05 — The head, 3.75 m tall, was modeled in plaster in Landowski's studio in Paris: Dkoukoul · CC BY-SA 3.0
• Fig. 06 — Each hand measures 3.20 m. Like the head, it was modeled at full size in Paris: Md mackinnon · CC BY-SA 4.0