Google Sightseeing takes you on tour of the world as seen from satellite, using the free Google Earth program, or Google Maps in your web browser. Each weekday your guides James and Alex present new weird and wonderful sights as suggested by readers.

The editors: James & Alex

Pão de Açúcar (Sugarloaf Mountain)

Posted by Alex Turnbull, Tuesday, 6th September 2005

1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars

This is Pão de Açúcar (Sugarloaf Mountain) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean, this peak rises 396 metres above Guanabara Bay. An absolutely awesome sight from up here.

Sugarloaf Mountain

The blue structure on the peak is the cable car station. You get on here, at the bottom, and then take a car up to the first peak, and then onwards to the very top! Also, these were the cable cars where they filmed the scene in Moonraker where Jaws bites right through the cable! Cool.

Cable car station

Just to the south here is the gigantic Copacabana beach! So big that you can easily fit what looks like a beach volleyball court on there! (Mmmm, beach volleyball… ;-) )

Copacabana Beach

Thanks and Bodo Maller, Didier, Tom B, Simon and Ronaldo Reis.

4 Responses to 'Pão de Açúcar (Sugarloaf Mountain)'

  1. Rob Marshall says:

    up to the north of Sugarloaf is a very long bridge – just north-east of that are a lot of naval ships – south-west of the bridge at Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth are a couple of aircraft carriers

  2. an MP says:

    I presume that the Carrier with the angled flight deck is the Sau Paulo, which used to belong to the French (then called Foch).

    Wikipedia has some stuff on it.

  3. Nick says:

    Kind of odd – when you try it in Google Earth, it shows the whole area as flat. You can see some mountains in the distance, but this mountain has no elevation.

  4. barni says:

    Talking about Rio… you shouldn’t forget the giant Jesus statue, it’s not far:
    Placemark: Google Maps / Google Earth

Leave a Reply

This form supports simple HTML, but URLs will be automatically linked.

Link to specific places with a Google Maps link, or with a latitude and longitude written like this:
lat/lng:55.9494,-3.2000

If you've found something that you think should be posted in its own entry then use the suggestion form!

Want your own icon? Get a Gravatar.