History

In 1808, the Portuguese royal family fled Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula and relocated to Rio de Janeiro, transforming the colonial city into the seat of empire. The slave trade had previously landed its human cargo near the royal palace — a proximity the court found unseemly. In 1811, the Valongo Wharf was constructed specifically to handle slave disembarkations, relocating the trade to the outskirts of the city centre while rendering it more efficient: the new structure provided a dedicated landing, holding, and commercial infrastructure for enslaved people arriving from West and Central Africa.

Between 1811 and the formal abolition of the transatlantic slave trade to Brazil in 1831, an estimated 500,000 to one million enslaved Africans passed through Valongo — the largest number to arrive at any single point in the Americas. They came primarily from present-day Mozambique, Angola, the Congo Basin, and West Africa. Those who survived the horrific Middle Passage were held in adjacent barracoons (slave pens) — crowded enclosures where they were assessed, “fattened,” and sold. Many did not survive this phase; an adjacent cemetery (the Cemitério dos Pretos Novos — “Cemetery of the New Blacks”) received those who died before or shortly after sale.

In 1843, with the trade officially suppressed, the wharf was covered over and transformed into the Cais da Imperatriz (Empress Wharf) to receive the new empress of Brazil, Teresa Cristina of the Two Sicilies. Subsequent decades of urban development further buried the site. It was not until 2011, when workers excavating the Saúde square for the Porto Maravilha project broke through the later paving, that the original 19th-century stone structure was revealed — largely intact beneath more than a metre of fill.

Excavations between 2011 and 2016 yielded thousands of artefacts that speak directly to the lives, beliefs, and origins of the enslaved people: cowrie shells used as currency in West Africa, clay pipes in forms specific to Central African traditions, glass and stone beads worn as personal ornaments, and iron tools. These objects, together with the physical structure of the wharf itself, constitute the most complete archaeological testimony of the transatlantic slave trade known to science.