Christ the Redeemer from Satellite View - Landmark

Christ the Redeemer

🗿 Landmarks Easy Level (Zoom 17)

📍 Coordinates -22.9519, -43.2105

💡 Official Game Hint "Arms wide open over Rio"

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"Arms wide open over Rio"

About Christ the Redeemer

Christ the Redeemer (Cristo Redentor) is the open-armed guardian of Rio de Janeiro, standing atop the 700-meter Corcovado mountain. This Art Deco soapstone giant is more than a statue; it is a symbol of welcome, peace, and the Brazilian spirit. Visible from nearly everywhere in the city, it appears to embrace the chaos, the favelas, the mansions, and the sea with equal unconditional love.

Satellite imagery shows the statue as a tiny, white cross at the center of the lush Tijuca Forest National Park, the highest point in the immediate vicinity. It overlooks the dramatic geography of Rio—the Sugarloaf, the lagoon, and the sweeping beaches. The road and train track winding up the mountain look like thin threads leading to the summit. It is the ultimate vantage point.

Up close, the statue is immense and serene, its soapstone tiles forming a mosaic of faith. The view from the platform is often cited as the most beautiful in the world, a panorama of green mountains and blue ocean. Whether shrouded in clouds or glowing in the night floodlights, the Redeemer exerts a protective presence, the silent, spiritual anchor of a city that lives life at full volume.

The statue was proposed by a French-Brazilian priest, Pedro Maria Boss, in 1859 but rejected as inappropriate for a still-imperial Brazil that had a state religion. The project resurfaced in 1921 through the Catholic Circle of Rio, which organised a national fundraising "Monument Week" that collected 2.5 million cruzeiros door-to-door from working-class parishioners across 500 cities—an early example of crowdfunding at national scale. The chosen design by Brazilian engineer Heitor da Silva Costa initially depicted the figure holding a cross in the right hand and a globe in the left, but a public vote in 1922 changed the pose to the outstretched-arms embrace we know today, and the final version was sculpted by Franco-Polish Paul Landowski in his Paris studio and shipped to Brazil in numbered pieces on a French steamer that took three months to arrive.

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🛰️ Satellite Identification Tips

At zoom 17, find the cleared circular platform on top of a steep, jungle-covered peak—Corcovado. The statue is barely a white speck, but the bare summit pad stands out against dense Atlantic Forest canopy. A thin cog-railway line threads up the western slope. Below to the south, the kidney-shaped Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon glints between mountains and city blocks.

Beyond the summit platform, additional geographic cues sharpen the identification. The Corcovado Rack Railway is the world's oldest still-operating rack-and-pinion mountain railway in continuous service, opened by Emperor Pedro II in 1884—16 years before the statue existed—and its 3.8-kilometre stone-cobbled track gradient reaches 30 per cent through three original tunnels. To the west, the granite crown of Pedra da Gávea rises to 844 metres and its eroded top has a natural rock face that appears from the west as the profile of a human head, an optical illusion that has fed local legends about Phoenician navigators. On the eastern face of Corcovado hangs one of the most vertical cliff-climbing routes in the world, the K2 route, whose bolted pitches follow a single continuous crack visible from above as a thin dark line down the rockface.

📊 Quick Facts

Built 1922-1931

Height 30 m (statue) + 8 m pedestal

Visitors/year ~2 million

Style Art Deco

Sculptor Paul Landowski

Time Zone BRT (UTC−3)

Material Reinforced concrete + soapstone tiles

Weight 635 tonnes

🌍 Did You Know?

The statue's outstretched arms span 28 metres—wider than the statue is tall—and are deliberately angled slightly downward so the figure appears to be embracing the city below.
Christ the Redeemer is struck by lightning an average of three to six times per year; in 2014 a bolt chipped off the tip of the right thumb, which was later restored.
The soapstone tiles covering the statue were hand-applied by local women who inscribed prayers and the names of loved ones on the back of each tile before mounting them.
Tijuca Forest, surrounding the statue, is the world's largest urban forest—replanted by hand in the 1860s after coffee plantations stripped the hills bare.
The soapstone used for the outer skin was sourced from a single quarry in Nova Friburgo, 150 kilometres northeast of Rio, chosen for its pale grey-green colour and its resistance to Rio's high humidity; a similar Brazilian soapstone is used today for kitchen countertops around the world under the trade name Steatite Verde
In April 2010, a graffiti artist scaled the statue during a thunderstorm and sprayed the face with the tags of a São Paulo tagging crew; the vandalism was removed within 48 hours by a specialist team using low-pressure air and micro-abrasion, and the incident led to the installation of the current 24-hour infrared surveillance system
The statue was granted its own patron feast day on 12 October in the Roman Catholic Church, coinciding with Brazil's national holiday for Our Lady of Aparecida; on that date each year an outdoor mass is celebrated on the summit and a specially designed multicoloured light show illuminates the figure from below

Christ the Redeemer

About Christ the Redeemer

🛰️ Satellite Identification Tips

📊 Quick Facts

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