RIO DE JANEIRO, SANTA CRUZ FORTRESS AND COMTEMPORAIN ART MUSEUM

From the top of Sugar Loaf, I felt the urge to cross the Guanabara Bay by the 14km bridge which joins Niteroi. Niteroi also has two interesting sites to visit: the Santa Cruz fortress and the museum of contemporary art.

With a friendly German guide, Lysa, we take the direction of Flamengo, then the port area before the bridge President Costa e Silva, usually known as Rio-Niteroi bridge. It is obviously impossible to stop and have a shot from the high point overlooking the bay of 70m.

Commissioned in 1974, traffic is more than 135 000 vehicles / day. The bridge has generated a large boom in Niteroi, where many cariocas moved.

At the end of the bridge, we discover platforms offshore yard, for oil business related construction. Discovery of large oilfields in Rio and Sao Paulo, have helped lift Brazil, through his company, Petrobras, as an important player in the oil & gas business.

To access the Santa Cruz fortress, it must first cross Niteroi and following the road shows some beautiful beaches (even if the water is said to be very polluted).

Then, a narrow road, carved in granite on a few hundred meters leads to the entrance gate of the military zone.

The fortress is located at the entrance to Guanabara Bay, it provided protection with his Fort St John planted on the opposite side at the foot of Sugar Loaf.

The visit costs 4 Réals and is insured by the soldiers of the garrison. The history of the place is interesting, full of stories. The only thing is that the visit is done too fast and having that young soldiers as a tour guide, is not necessarily the best. However here after we have some photos of the site.

Chapel Santa Barbara

Inner courtyard

Artillery battery

Fortress jails

Garrison

From a scenic point of view, the views of the Guanabara Bay, Rio and Sugar Loaf are exceptional, and only for this, that visit is a must.

We return now to the center of Niteroi, for a tour of another famous site of interest, the museum of contemporary art.

Its futuristic architecture is the work of Brazilian master Oscar Nemeyer. Although the artist has designed the project with the idea of a flower, it seems, from a certain distance, to be a flying disk of another galaxy standing on a cliff.

Made of reinforced white concrete, the building, rises to 16m and the maximum diameter of the dome is about twenty meters. There are three levels of access and a glass passageway is round, offering a panoramic view of Guanabara Bay, Sugar Loaf and the island Boa Viagem (bon voyage)

A ramp painted of bright red provides access to the dome.

The cylindrical base of the building stands on a mirror of water.

From the outside under a certain angle, one can see the parallelism between the slope of the dome and the Sugar Loaf, a detail certainly intended by the artist.

On the inside, we admired some intriguing works, but as always in this kind of exhibition, it is very difficult to decrypt the message conveyed by the artist, and are there one?

We end our tour by crossing the bay via ferry this time.

This will give us an alternative vision and in particular, we can see the palace Pedro II built on a small island. It was not used by the emperor for a long time since the day after his grand opening, the republic was proclaimed and ordered his removal. Now it’s a museum.

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