Parque Nacional da Tijuca

This magnificent national park embraces the city with its lush forests. Its excellent walks and trails offer some of the best views of the city. Tijuaca contains the highest peaks of river and is one of the largest urban parks in the world. Most of the park was repopulated in the nineteenth century. This land so fertile was deforested during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to make way for sugar and coffee plantations. After several disastrous landslides, the authorities decided to restore the original landscape and prompted a massive restoration campaign between 1861 and 1888, a total of 130,000 copies were planted.