Today’s city flows over the undulating countryside like honey over ice cream. It climbs the slopes of the inaccessible lumps and bulges until even the Favelas – slums – can’t find a foothold. Where houses can’t go the jungle does. Rio is the only city in the world to have a full-on rain forest within municipal boundaries.

Contrasting with the dense green of the forest are the concrete towers of the skyscraper hotels that line Copacabana beach. But famous as it is, Copacabana isn’t the best part of Rio de Janiero. Just a short hop along the sand or the promenade is the area known as Ipanema, made famous thanks to the Astrud Gilberto song with the Stan Getz accompaniment. Here the sands are cleaner, the girls and boys even more beautiful, the bikinis more colourful and the town softer, more welcoming and more relaxed.

Take in the bars and the cafés, sit on the sand and watch the beautiful people at play; at night, marvel at the backdrop of twinkling fairy lights that climb to the sky at the end of the sand. Marvel also that the lights are the flickering illuminations of hundreds of thousands of paper, cardboard and corrugated iron shacks that make up the world’s biggest Favela.

CARIOCAS

Rio locals call themselves Cariocas, a name directly linked to the samba music that pervades the city day and night. It seems that this, one of the world’s most densely populated cities, never sleeps. No matter what time it is, someone somewhere is partying somewhere. Bars tend to stay open until four in the morning and clubs spill their clientele out into the street to join the office morning rush hour. Samba’s main time of the year is of course the Carnival at Easter when the famed parades fill the streets for days, but start your dance training early as it takes a while to master the intricate footwork.

While you are there, find time to take the funicular railway up to the statue of The Christ of Corcovado, the concrete and steel figure that seems to embrace the whole city within its outstretched arms. And don’t forget the cable car that swings you over to the Sugar Loaf plonked down on the edge of the bay. If you like football, consider a visit to the pulsating Maracanã stadium where the four local teams play their home games – be prepared for noise, noise and more noise.

Meat is the staple of Rio’s cuisine, and there are restaurants that seem to serve nothing else, the Churrascarias; all you can eat cantinas where waiters carve slices from whole joints speared onto swords straight onto your plate whenever you pause for a moment’s breather. Other local favourites include Feijoada, Brazil’s national dish of rice, black beans and pork, and Caldo, a soup normally served as the forerunner to Feijoada. To wash it all down try Choppe, a German-influenced, but locally brewed beer, and the ubiquitous Caipirinha, a drink with a kick like a peon’s mule, made from sugar, the juice and pulp from a couple of small limes, topped up with clear, fiery cane spirit.