Explore Rio de Janeiro in Google Street View

Rio is shaped by geology in a way almost no other large city is. Enormous granite domes rise straight out of the sea and out of the middle of residential districts, and the city has had to fit itself into whatever flat ground was left between them. Street View makes this legible in a way maps do not: on an ordinary residential street in Botafogo you can turn the camera and find a vertical rock face at the end of the block.

The Tijuca forest is the other half of the story. It is a tropical rainforest inside the city limits, and it is largely replanted: the original forest was cleared for coffee in the nineteenth century until the water supply started failing, at which point the emperor ordered it reforested from the 1860s. Several of the trails through it were captured on foot, so you can follow paths through dense forest and then come out onto a road with buses on it.

Christ the Redeemer stands on Corcovado in the middle of that forest, and the imagery around the base is on foot. What is more interesting than the statue is the view platform, because it shows you the whole geography at once: the lagoon, the beaches, Sugarloaf, the bay and the ranges running inland. Open it first and the rest of the city makes more sense afterwards.

The beaches are covered along their full length on the promenade side, and the two big ones are different places. Copacabana is dense, high-rise and continuous, with a black-and-white wave pattern in the pavement designed by Roberto Burle Marx. Ipanema is lower, wealthier and quieter, and at the western end you get the Dois Irmãos peaks directly behind the sand, which is the best composition on the coast.

Santa Teresa is the neighbourhood to explore slowly. It sits on a hill above the centre, was where wealthy families moved to escape a nineteenth-century fever epidemic, and is a maze of narrow winding streets with mansions on them in varying states of repair. A tram still runs up to it over an eighteenth-century aqueduct, and the Selarón Steps at the bottom, two hundred and fifteen steps covered in tiles from around the world by one man over twenty years, were captured on foot.

It is worth being straightforward about coverage. Rio has extensive favelas, some of them very large, and Street View coverage of them is limited and uneven; some have been mapped, many have not, and some of what exists is user-contributed rather than Google's. A quarter of the city's population lives in them, so a Street View tour of Rio is not a complete picture of the city, and it is better to say so than to let the gaps pass unnoticed.