Critical Urban Park in Rio de Janeiro’s North Zone Is at Risk of Disappearing After Decades of Government Neglect
This article is part of a series created in partnership with the Behner Stiefel Center for Brazilian Studies at San Diego State University, to produce articles for the Digital Brazil Project on environmental justice in the favelas through RioOnWatch. Ary Barroso Park is an important green recreational space and the only park dedicated to serving the Leopoldina region in Rio de Janeiro’s North Zone.
However, due to a lack of government attention, the park risks disappearing completely, which would further worsen the intense heat affecting the region. Inaugurated on December 13, 1964, in the Penha Circular neighborhood in the North Zone, Ary Barroso Park was built on the former grounds of Chácara das Palmeiras, which at the time belonged to Francisco Lobo Júnior, an influential Portuguese entrepreneur.
Penha, then occupied by upper-middle-class homes, was chosen to receive what was considered a “replica” of Quinta da Boa Vista, which until then had been the city’s most widely visited green leisure space. It is worth noting that Penha sits within the Leopoldina region, which in the past was an important industrial and residential hub precisely because it was crossed by the former Leopoldina Railway, currently the Gramacho Branch of the city’s train system.
After opening to the public, Ary Barroso Park became the first and largest park in the Leopoldina suburban area and was listed as a historic landmark of the state of Rio de Janeiro on October 8, 1965. Ary Barroso Park’s Golden Years The park was designed with a lake at its center, surrounded by two small waterfalls, a playground, three sports courts and other structures linked to Lobo Júnior’s former home, all laid out over a sloping 50,000-square-meter plot.
To give a sense of scale, city government data equates the area to seven official soccer fields. Ary Barroso Park was conceived to resemble a woodland, a green space defined by shade-giving trees.
Its original green reserve held over 300 plant species, including purple and pink quaresmeiras, purple, yellow and white ipê trees, mulungu trees, African tulip trees, red flamboyants and yellow and purple cassias. Its artificial waterfalls were powered by pumps that supplied a ten-centimeter-deep flow of water over a three-meter stretch.
Water was pumped up to the source from a pump house at the highest point of the park, from where it flowed down in the form of a waterfall over two lakes before being collected and recirculated. In the sports area, three courts were used for soccer, basketball and other sports and physical activities, such as capoeira and tai chi.
They featured bleachers and a locker room that once served as the home base for Portinho Futebol Clube. The playground was also popular with both local residents and people from across the city.
The park’s name honors Brazilian singer and composer Ary Barroso, who died in February of the same year it opened. Barroso was chosen because he was a devoted attendee of the Penha Festival, a traditional religious celebration honoring the neighborhood’s patron saint, and even composed a song that mentions the area.
The park’s heyday was short-lived, however, undermined by a series of factors including exclusionary housing policies and deep social inequalities. From Oasis to Abandonment: A Timeline of Environmental Racism at Ary Barroso Park As early as the 1960s, the city of Rio de Janeiro underwent major demographic and urban changes, among them the forced removal of favela residents from the South Zone to areas in the North and West Zones.
In this traumatic chapter of the city’s history, an estimated 140,000 people were forcibly displaced. That number today would be equivalent to the entire population of Complexo da Maré.
The Penha area, like the entire Leopoldina region, which had previously been home to the elite, became home to low-income residents displaced from other areas through housing projects, becoming a site of intense and unplanned urban expansion. During this same period, Rio de Janeiro ceased to be the federal capital, contributing to the economic decline of both the city and its industrial complex.
The Leopoldina region felt those effects as well. Land was subdivided and sold to middle-class buyers, with no provision for green or recreational areas, only residential units.
This drove even greater urban expansion into an area that already had little tree cover, turning the Leopoldina region into a heat island. Neglect became part of daily life at Ary Barroso Park, which entered a long and painful process of deterioration.
By 1979, for example, the park’s facilities were already obsolete due to abandonment, with water that was no longer very clean and little security. Just five years earlier, in 1974, the situation had been different: the park had served as an important source of water security for the area during a severe water shortage in the city.
It was Ary Barroso Park’s lake that allowed Penha residents to meet basic hygiene needs, such as bathing and washing clothes. Despite this, neglect became routine, and the park became defined by the loss of its original character and precarious conditions.
In July 2024, the park was left without a manager, and since then, day after day, residents have worried about the possibility that the area’s only park could disappear entirely. Ary Barroso Park Today According to a survey conducted by the Society of Friends of Ary Barroso Park (SAMPAB) in 2019, the park, which once had around 3,000 trees, now has only 500, with no care, maintenance or replacement of what has been lost.
And there are other problems. The lakes, for example, have been dry for years, full of water and life only in memory.
The former pump house stands vandalized and abandoned, with large amounts of garbage inside. Large amounts of dead and overgrown vegetation cover the park throughout, even blocking pedestrian pathways.
Trees also require pruning to keep their health. The park has become a site of drug use, with the frequent presence of people struggling with addiction, increasing visitors’ sense of insecurity.
The accumulation of waste and the park’s state of degradation have also been the subject of scientific research. In an article titled “Accumulation and Improper Disposal of Urban Solid Waste: A Case Study of Ary Barroso Park (RJ),” Pammela Primo de Oliveira Silva, a doctoral researcher in Environmental Engineering at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) and a local resident, analyzes the park’s situation.
Examining the relationship between accumulation and improper disposal of solid waste, racism and environmental injustice in the Leopoldina region, the study identifies a higher concentration of improperly discarded waste in the upper portion of the park, near the entrance to the Caixa d’Água favela, including plastic, construction debris, sharp objects, consumer electronics, wood and organic waste, highlighting gaps in waste management, urban cleaning and environmental oversight systems. Areas where rainwater puddled were noted to contain larvae, creating favorable conditions for the proliferation of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes.
Furthermore, the study highlighted the deteriorating condition of the archaeological areas within the park, which have been suffering from a lack of conservation, the recurring dumping of waste and the risk of losing historical materials, all of which point to impacts on the site’s archaeological heritage. Ary Barroso Park faces the difficult task of being the
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Fonte: Rioonwatch.
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