Rocinha, notes from South America’s largest favela - where daily life, crime, and culture coexist
Part of the series Dispatches from Brazil. Episode 10.
Up the hill
When we showed up at 9am at Rocinha underground stop for a tour of the favela, we didn’t know what to expect. We booked the tour after spotting it on TripAdvisor — curious to see such an emblematic part of Brazilian society and, let’s admit it, to feel a bit of the thrill that comes with proximity to the local criminal economy. For some years now, Favela Tours has provided a way for outsiders to explore Rocinha and Vidigal while also feeding back to the local economy. We picked Rocinha as it’s the largest favela in South America, with an estimated 175,000+ residents, a flourishing internal economy, and its own cultural life.
To give you an idea: Rocinha has shops, cafés, banks, gyms, hair salons, schools, health clinics, cultural centers, hostels — even a McDonald’s. Add to that a buzzing informal economy of street vendors, home businesses, and repair shops.
It is a proper working-class neighbourhood that lives by its own rules but unlike lots of segregated neighbourhoods in London and Paris, it is by no means closed off. Most residents go in and out every day. Many work as housekeepers, doormen, drivers, gardeners, or nannies in the wealthy neighbourhoods of São Conrado (with its luxury towers) and Gávea/Leblon (with their universities and middle-class jobs). Others are construction workers, electricians, or plumbers across the city.
Informal transport is also big business: moto-taxis and vans that link Rocinha to the rest of Rio. We got a taste of it firsthand when we hopped on the back of a moto-taxi — no helmet required, apparently — and shot up the tortuous, overcrowded main street at 70 km/h. Our guide tipped the drivers and walked us through the city view from the mirador, the terrace at the top of the favela.
The view is spectacular: Rocinha sprawls over the hillside, wedged between São Conrado’s luxury towers and Leblon’s millionaire condos, with the Atlantic ocean opening wide in front. Just a few hundred meters downhill, we see the American School, the most expensive international school of Rio de Janeiro.
Given such prime location, you may wonder how low-income residents have resisted gentrification or outright buyouts from developers and tourism investors. We’ll get there in a moment.
The origin of the favela
Rocinha was born from the ashes of a failed Portuguese coffee plantation, whose land was sold in 1919 to the workers already living there. They switched from monoculture to vegetables and sold the surplus in Gávea’s markets. Hence the name Rocinha - “little farm” in Portuguese.
The settlement grew into a favela with the waves of rural-to-urban migration in the mid-20th century. Families of Portuguese, Italian, and French descent settled the steep hillsides, with the French concentrated near the high point called Laboriaux.
Over time, Rocinha transformed — from wooden shanties to brick and concrete houses, then to taller, multi-story structures as density increased. Fields are long gone; today, there isn’t a single free patch of land. Buildings are amassed one on top of the other and every inch of land seems taken. According to our guide, only two trees remain standing in the whole of Rocinha. The rest is covered in cement.
The rulers and their rules
How is Rocinha different from any other working-class neighborhood? Mainly because the Brazilian state is absent, and power lies with criminal organisations. This dynamic developed through the late 20th century, as government neglect allowed drug gangs and informal associations to establish parallel governance.
Here, the Comando Vermelho (CV), or Red Command, exerts control. The CV is Rio’s oldest criminal organization, born in the 1970s from alliances between prisoners and leftist guerrillas on Ilha Grande. It grew throughout the 1980s, expanding into cocaine, arms trafficking, protection rackets, and turf wars.
Its presence is impossible to miss even for tourists like us. Tour guides need to be authorised by the Comando and agree to carry a tracker app, so called Favela app. During tours, they need to report at CV-controlled check points where entry for each area of the favela must be approved before the group is allowed to proceed. Groups stick to strict routes and schedules, monitored by CV personnel, and filming is banned in sensitive areas. The criminal business is held into secondary alleys, far from the chaos of the main street - there we saw heavily armed men, drug packets piled up on tables, money and drugs changing hands in plain sight. At one point, our group was stopped after a report that someone had used camera glasses in a no-filming zone. A CV representative appeared, checked the footage of the person involved, and eventually waved us on. A neat reminder of who’s really in charge.
The CV’s power even shows up in branding. Drug packets are stamped with the initials CV, the Rocinha acronym RC, and the stylised images of the two leaders John Wallace da Silva Viana, a.k.a. Johnny Bravo, and Rogério 157. A slogan boasts: “The best weed of the South Zone,” with the price printed on the envelope — standardizing the market and preventing dealers from marking it up.
The “pacification”
In 2008, the state launched the Pacifying Police Units (UPPs) to retake favelas from traffickers, eventually reaching Rocinha with thousands of officers and soldiers. The push coincided with Rio’s Olympics boom and the lure of its hillside real estate. It wasn’t the first time: in the 1960s, the military dictatorship forcibly removed favelas from beachfront land, pushing families far west. Rocinha, however, was too big and politically costly to bulldoze.
This latest attempt of pacification in Rocinha unraveled quickly. Scandals over corruption and brutality destroyed its credibility, culminating in the torture and murder by the police of Amarildo Dias de Souza, a bricklayer and respected resident of the community. The case dominated the news and put a nail on the coffin of the project. In the end, Rocinha’s size, tight-knit networks, political activism, and the armed protection of the entrenched CV made eviction impossible. Today, the state maintains a token pacification post on the main street, tolerated only because its officers are reportedly paid off by the CV.
Grupo Senzala and Wark Rocinha
In our descent from the hill top we stopped at Grupo Senzala de Capoeira, a youth association that trains kids and teenagers in capoeira. It’s discipline, art, and social glue all in one, keeping young people off the streets. Their roda was impressive, and everyone was clapping along enthusiastically.
Just around the corner, the murals of Wark Rocinha (Marcos Rodrigo Neves), the favela’s most visible street artist, brighten the favela with their shiny colours.
His “Warkanjo” figures — wide-eyed angels and clownish faces — cover entire facades, and his permanent open-air exhibit Colorindo Vidas (“Coloring Lives”) turns Rocinha alleyways into a gallery.
Together, capoeira and graffiti felt like Rocinha’s unofficial trademarks: culture as both defence and identity.
We walked down secondary alleys, narrow and dark, before stopping for a coffee and açai at the designated cafeteria, along with other group of tourists.
There, some fellas offered drone photography, others some generic souvenirs. We sticked to a much needed bottle of water and took a couple of shots of the nearby houses.
Out of the secondary alleys, we passed by the local school before rejoining the buzzing main street, with its stream of vans, cars, motorbikes incessantly going up and down the hill for all sort of businesses, before getting to the end of our trip, the Rocinha tube station at the very bottom of the hill.
Walking down the steps of the tube, it felt less like we had “visited” a favela and more like we’d briefly stepped into another city inside Rio — one that runs by its own rules but is undeniably part of the whole. A unique community that isn’t only defined by crime or poverty but even more by hustle, creativity, and pride of its people.
The photography
Once on hilltop, I decided to start shooting with my 35mm equivalent, an all around, not knowing exactly what to expect. I shot the initial ones and the capoeira show and was pleased with the result. I mounted the 84mm equivalent on a panoramic terrace where I wanted to zoom some details of the houses around us.
At that point, before getting back into the alleys, I decided to mount the 28mm equivalent so that I could capture the whole elevation of some of the buildings as well as the close up spaces of the dark alleys, where I was forced to shoot with high aperture to be able to expose properly. The 28mm shined as usual providing a very decent depth of field even at F/5.6 and I enjoyed playing with the light cuts offered by the narrow architecture at mid day.
A part from the lack of light in the alleys, the shooting conditions were also challenging due to the logistics imposed by the tour: the group walked in line most of the times and I had to keep the pace. Therefore I was unable to stop for more than a couple of seconds in order to work the scene of try an alternative framing. On top of that, we were clearly identified as tourists by the residents and playing the fly on the wall was impossible. Despite the above, I think I came out with some good shots, respecting the spirit of the community and the dignity of the people living and working in the favela.
If you managed to make till here, I'd be happy to hear your thoughts and feedbacks to this post. Obrigado!
This post is part of the Dispatches from Brazil series — a photographic journey hrough the Northeast of the country — from Amazonian river towns to coastal villages and markets, down to Rio de Janeiro.
Terrific shots and very informative. I like the shots of the painted signs, the blurred motorcycle, and the waving hands from the school bus.
Fantastic photography, despite your constraints. Very dynamic and colourful which effectively tell the story. Great work.