Brazil's favelas are named after a stinging shrub from a distant battlefield
In the late 1800s, soldiers returning from the Canudos War in Bahia found no housing in Rio de Janeiro and settled on a hill in the city centre. They nicknamed it after Favela Hill back in Bahia, itself named for a skin-irritating local plant. The word came to mean every improvised neighbourhood of Brazil's urban poor.
That first settlement grew on Providência hill. Freed Africans soon joined the veterans, and some early communities were called African neighbourhoods. Even before then, Rio's poor had been pushed out to distant suburbs. With slavery abolished and people streaming in from the countryside looking for work, many new arrivals could not afford city housing and built their own on the hillsides.
Official recognition came surprisingly late. Rio's 1937 building code was the first document to acknowledge that favelas existed, marking the start of explicit policy towards them. A housing crisis in the 1940s and Getúlio Vargas's push to industrialise pulled hundreds of thousands of migrants to the capital, and favelas replaced tenements as the main home for poor Cariocas. When the capital moved to Brasília in 1960, jobs in Rio dwindled, yet migrants stayed, living close to the city but without its sanitation or electricity.
Under the military dictatorship of the 1970s an eradication policy displaced hundreds of thousands of people, some into public housing such as Cidade de Deus, later famous from the film City of God. Poor planning and underinvestment meant many projects decayed into new favelas, and a building boom in wealthy districts drew more workers from poorer states. From the 1980s, Rio's role as a transit point for cocaine bound for Europe brought gangs and guns, and today Pacifying Police Units manage many favelas while others remain under criminal or militia control.
The scale is large and hard to pin down, since boundaries shift and homes are often unregistered. In 2010 roughly 6 percent of Brazilians lived in favelas and similar settlements; the 2022 census counted 12,348 favelas and urban communities housing about 8.1 percent of the population. Residents build associations to win water and power, sometimes gaining title to their land, though crowding, disease and landslide risk remain serious.
Source: Favela
