Favela Tour

The Favela Tour is a type of tourism aimed at visiting the favelas, which has grown a lot in recent years.

By: Sheila Souza(Santa Marta)

About

In the city of Rio de Janeiro, where the majority of Brazil's favela population is concentrated at 22% of the more than six million residents according to IBGE data from the 2010 census, we see a high incidence of this type of tourism.

Motivation

There's plenty of motivations for people to go up into the hills or into peripheral areas of the city to get to know the local way of life: the historical, cultural, social, architectural, structural and organizational aspects that differ greatly from the organization of the formal city around them. The Favela Tour of the Rocinha favela was the first company to develop this type of tourism in the 90s.

In 2008, the favela tour gained momentum with the State Security Department's Pacification project. Pacification meant that the government would take over these areas through the military police and BOPE (Special Operations Battalion) to remove drug trafficking. With the UPP (Pacifying Police Unit) inside the favela, the safety of visitors was officially guaranteed and this led to the development of favela tours in these areas. The Santa Marta favela, located in the Botafogo district in the south of Rio de Janeiro, was the first favela to receive the UPP and to develop the Rio Top Tour project.

Rio Top Tour

Rio Top Tour was an agreement signed by the Ministry of Tourism and the Rio de Janeiro State Secretariat for Tourism, Sport and Leisure, which aimed to exploit the tourist potential that the favelas were beginning to gain. Rio Top Tour trained and qualified residents to be tourism agents in the Santa Marta favela through a partnership with the technical tourism course at the Antonio Prado Junior State College, so that they could start monitoring tourist demand together with these residents in the training phase. Since then, the Favela Tour has been developing steadily in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. The Santa Marta favela was the pioneer in establishing a government tourism project.