Metropolitan Cathedral of Rio de Janeiro: a Mayan-inspired concrete cone that replaced two centuries of imperial coronations

On Avenida República do Chile, in central Rio de Janeiro, the Metropolitan Cathedral of Saint Sebastian is the seat of the Catholic archdiocese of Rio de Janeiro. The foundation stone was blessed on 20 January 1964 by Cardinal Jaime de Barros Câmara, the feast day of Saint Sebastian, to a design by the architect Edgar de Oliveira da Fonseca, with landscaping by Roberto Burle Marx and structural calculations by the technical office named after the engineer Emílio Baumgart; the first mass was celebrated there, in the still unfinished building, at Christmas 1972, the official inauguration took place on 16 November 1976 for the third centenary of the archdiocese, and the solemn dedication as a cathedral followed on 15 August 1979. The building, Modernist Brutalist in style, has the form of a truncated cone inspired by the Maya pyramids, seventy-five metres high outside and sixty-four inside, with a diameter of one hundred and six metres and an interior area of eight thousand square metres, holding twenty thousand people standing; four vertical stained-glass windows, each sixty-four metres high, meet at the ceiling to form a Greek cross above a great crucifix. The cathedral replaced, as archiepiscopal seat, the church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, facing Praça XV de Novembro, which from 1808, when the Portuguese royal family moved there fleeing Napoleon’s troops, had become the royal and then imperial chapel: here, in 1822 and 1841, the only two emperors in Brazilian history were crowned, the only two Christian coronations ever held in South America; the old seat, still standing as an active parish on the same square, is today known as the “Antiga Sé”. Rio de Janeiro was the capital of colonial Brazil from 1763, the seat of the entire Portuguese empire from 1808 to 1821 — the only time in history that the capital of a European monarchy stood in the Americas — and the national capital until the move to Brasília in 1960. The archdiocese of Rio, erected as a territorial prelature on 19 July 1575, raised to a diocese on 16 November 1676 and to a metropolitan archdiocese on 27 April 1892, has been led by Cardinal Orani João Tempesta since 2009; Pope Leo XIV accepted his resignation in August 2025, but asked him to stay in office for up to two more years, pending a successor. Pope John Paul II celebrated mass in this cathedral on 4 October 1997, before more than five hundred bishops and a thousand priests; Pope Francis came twice in July 2013, during World Youth Day, meeting young Argentinians on 25 July and celebrating mass with bishops, priests and religious on 27 July.