Secret Rio ('Secret' guides)

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Let Secret Rio guide you around the unusual and unfamiliar. Step off the beaten track with this fascinating Rio travel guide book and let our local experts show you over 150 well-hidden treasures of an amazing city. Ideal for local inhabitants, curious visitors and armchair travellers alike. The places included in our guides are unusual and unfamiliar, allowing one to step off the beaten track. 

• Visit an extraordinary hill where the 'little angels' are buried
• Discover remarkable forgotten Art Deco buildings
• See a plane taking off at really close range
• Experience leftovers from the 1908 and 1922 Universal Expositions
• View a beautiful private palace open to visitors once a month
• Marvel at modernist ceramics hidden on the 15th-floor terrace of a former government building
• Explore little-known walks and views of the city
• Find an Amazonian talisman at Copacabana
• Uncover vestiges of the Carioca river
• Photograph a rare statue of the great-grandmother of Jesus
• Enjoy a taxi nightclub, a work of art in a favela, a disused airship hangar...

Far from the crowds and the usual beach and carnival clichés, Rio de Janeiro has countless treasures it reveals only to residents and travellers who wander off the beaten track. An indispensable guide for all those who thought they were familiar with Rio or would like to discover the other face of the city.

The definitive insider’s guide to Rio.

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Thomas Jonglez was born and grew up in Paris. At the age of 22 he set out to discover the world, and spent most of 1992 backpacking around South America. Next he bought a one-way ticket to Beijing, from where he decided to make his way back to Paris overland – a trip that took him seven months. On his return, he tirelessly trawled the streets of Paris for material to write his first guidebook, which was published in 1996. After several years with the steel industry, he launched his publishing company in 2003. The first edition of Secret Paris came out in 2007. Ever since, he has regularly strolled around the capital, constantly surprised to discover new secret places in a city he thought he knew so well.

Manoel de Almeida e Silva

Born in the very traditional neighbourhood of Gamboa, Manoel de Almeida e Silva grew up in Engenho Velho, a long-forgotten name for the area around Tijuca in Rio’s Zona Norte. As a journalist and education specialist, he has lived in several countries during twenty-eight years of work with the United Nations, but has now settled in Copacabana. For this guide he has revived personal memories which, combined with his own research and suggestions from friends who are equally enthusiastic about Carioca diversity, aim to help expand the city’s tourist itinerary.

Márcio Alves Roiter

Founder of the Instituto Art Déco Brasil (2005), Márcio Alves Roiter is the author of Rio de Janeiro Art Déco (Casa da Palavra, 2011), Art Nouveau e Art Déco: Estilos de Sedução (Espaço Cultural Península, 2013) and Um Passeio na História (with Cynthia Garcia; Arezzo, 2010). Winner of the Cultural Award of the State of Rio de Janeiro, he has organised various exhibitions in Brazil and France, set up the 11th World Congress on Art Deco in Rio in 2011 and acted as a consultant for the restoration of many Art Deco buildings. He was also a speaker at the World Congress on Art Deco in New York (2005), Melbourne (2007) and Montreal (2009).

Thomas Jonglez was born and grew up in Paris. At the age of 22 he set out to discover the world, and spent most of 1992 backpacking around South America. Next he bought a one-way ticket to Beijing, from where he decided to make his way back to Paris overland – a trip that took him seven months. On his return, he tirelessly trawled the streets of Paris for material to write his first guidebook, which was published in 1996. After several years with the steel industry, he launched his publishing company in 2003. The first edition of Secret Paris came out in 2007. Ever since, he has regularly strolled around the capital, constantly surprised to discover new secret places in a city he thought he knew so well.

Manoel de Almeida e Silva

Born in the very traditional neighbourhood of Gamboa, Manoel de Almeida e Silva grew up in Engenho Velho, a long-forgotten name for the area around Tijuca in Rio’s Zona Norte. As a journalist and education specialist, he has lived in several countries during twenty-eight years of work with the United Nations, but has now settled in Copacabana. For this guide he has revived personal memories which, combined with his own research and suggestions from friends who are equally enthusiastic about Carioca diversity, aim to help expand the city’s tourist itinerary.

Márcio Alves Roiter

Founder of the Instituto Art Déco Brasil (2005), Márcio Alves Roiter is the author of Rio de Janeiro Art Déco (Casa da Palavra, 2011), Art Nouveau e Art Déco: Estilos de Sedução (Espaço Cultural Península, 2013) and Um Passeio na História (with Cynthia Garcia; Arezzo, 2010). Winner of the Cultural Award of the State of Rio de Janeiro, he has organised various exhibitions in Brazil and France, set up the 11th World Congress on Art Deco in Rio in 2011 and acted as a consultant for the restoration of many Art Deco buildings. He was also a speaker at the World Congress on Art Deco in New York (2005), Melbourne (2007) and Montreal (2009).