Until the 1930s, Tijuca was aristocratic. Ipanema was nothing more than an uninhabited sandy beach isolated from the city.
It was cheap to live, attracting people with little money and creativity.
The mythical beach has attracted loyal fans and has been the scene of revolutions in the country’s music, literature, cinema, fashion, and customs.
When writer Ruy Castro recognized the many talents associated with the 2.6-kilometer-long beach, he came up with the idea of studying the culture of Ipanema.
“This didn’t happen in any other neighborhood in Rio or any other city. And I began to ask myself why,” Castro says.
The answers can be found in his book “Ela é Carioca,” an encyclopedia of 237 entries that make Ipanema a laboratory for the city’s customs.
From the fusion of so many talents and freedoms was born the samba, or rather, the bossa nova, the new cinema O Pasquim.
The beach was occupied from the west, Arpoador, to the east, towards Leblon.
Divided into redoubts, it attracted different types of beachgoers, which in turn gave these beaches an identity.
After Arpoador, it went to Castelinho, where everyone discovered themselves as teenagers.
In Montenegro, which suddenly came of age, politics dominated.
The Pier was home to hardship and drugs. Sol Ipanema was to unite all previous trends.
ARPOADOR
Until the 1930s, the sands of Arpoador were inhabited by the neighborhood’s first residents, fishermen from Copacabana and, above all, Englishmen and Americans from Light, the city’s electric company.
English was the predominant language on the sand.
Located at the far end of the beach, Arpoador was practically secret at the time.
Until the tunnels connecting the neighborhoods opened, each beach was frequented by local residents.
Until the arrival of the “day laborers”.
These were young men who frequented the beach every day and for whom the deserted beach was the place where they went after class and stayed until nightfall to play soccer, fall into the water, or flirt.
It was the Arpoador of Marina Colasanti, Zózimo Bulbul (the first and until then the only black boy in the beach scene), Roberto Menescal, and Marilia Kranz.
Arpoador had always hosted different groups; until then, no group had dominated the others.
But in 1964, surfing took over, and the regulars began to leave.
CASTELINHO
Between 1960 and 1967, the section between Rainha Elizabeth and Francisco Otaviano streets experienced its peak.
The nickname comes from a small Moorish castle, tower and all, that the Swedish consul Johan Jansson had built near the sand in the early 20th century.
But it wasn’t just the architecture that caught the eye. It was Mau Cheiro, a grimy bar in an outer borough.
The crowd consisted of theater people, budding filmmakers (the future directors of the new cinema), bossa nova fans, journalists, and bohemians of all kinds.
It was the only bar overlooking the sea.
The pioneers’ Jaguar and Tom Jobim frequented it since the 1950s, as did the drivers of the G. Osório bus, who stopped at the beach.
Osório bus drivers stopped there and used the adjacent wasteland as an open-air toilet – hence the stench that gave the bar its name.
In 1962, Glauber Rocha and co. dedicated themselves to the film and stopped participating.
But through them, the Mau Cheiro began to attract an even younger audience. From then on, Ipanema became the beach par excellence of Rio.
In the following years, Castelinho had his big moment.
Magazine photographers were always there, and beachgoers were featured on several of these pages. But by 1965, the new spot was different.
MONTENEGRO
This was the beach of the intellectuals, used by filmmakers, cartoonists, photographers, artists, poets, and actresses.
Montenegro, on the other hand, was a weekend beach – from Monday to Friday, most beachgoers traded bikinis and swim shorts for suits.
The program after the beach was the Veloso, where intellectuals like Rubem Braga, Vinicius de Moraes, and Fernando Sabino stayed, preferring to drink rather than go into the sea.
Vinicius defined it as “a bar for discreet men, where no one bothers and whose greatest pleasure is to talk without saying much.”
At the tables of Veloso, Tom and Vinicius contemplated Helô Pinheiro, she, the girl.
This attracted a new clientele, and at the end of 1966, the bar was renamed “Girl of Ipanema”, remodeled and no longer a dirty bar.
Regulars like Leila Diniz did not agree with these changes and continued to visit the bar for a while but refused to call it by its new name.
The bar still stands today on Rua Vinicius de Moraes (formerly Montenegro), but without the tradition that made it famous and with many tourists.
PIER
For three summers, freedom reigned at the Pier. Unlike the rest of the country, which lived under the military regime’s censorship, imprisonment, and torture, prohibition was banned there.
The Pier was a framework of iron and wood built in 1970 to construct the underwater outlet in Ipanema.
The pipes that jutted 300 meters into the sea formed violent waves, ideal for surfing.
The sand dredged from the sea and dumped on the beach formed artificial dunes – not coincidentally nicknamed “cheap dunes” – that attracted Gal Costa, Jards Macalé, Neville d’Almeida, almost all in their early twenties and harbingers of the “counterculture”.
The Pier became a hippie beach. This revived the custom of clapping at sunset, introduced ten years earlier in Arpoador.
The sound was rock and tropical, while in Arpoador and Castelinho, jazz and bossa nova reigned. In the dunes, people sang, played guitar, and smoked marijuana.
The surfers were the first to leave; the artists quietly moved on until the Pier was frequented only by tourists in 1973.
With the end of work on the drain, the dunes were flattened, and the Pier was blown up.
THE FIRST TOPLESS
The area around the Pier was the setting for the first topless film on Ipanema beach in 1972.
Photographer Frederico Mendes was enjoying the beach after doing a report for Pais & Filhos magazine when he noticed the scene:
“I saw a girl, but beautiful, with flowers on her head, walking back and forth without a bikini top. And what was even more interesting was that no one was looking at the girl’s ‘breasts,'” Frederico told the website “Bom dia, Ipanema.”
The photographer had no doubts: he took photos from a distance and then up close. “Then the beach became a mess! […]
And amid this mess, another girl also took off her bra in solidarity with her friend.” The photo above, the most famous of the sequence, was taken at the moment when the girl decided to put on her blouse to go home after the circus.
“News of this so-called ‘topless’ spread throughout the city. The next day, Sunday, all the major newspapers and television stations sent teams to the Ipanema Pier to report on ‘the bare-chested Carioca girls,'” Frederico wrote.
IPANEMA SUN
Perhaps it was because of the number of people concentrated on so few meters of sand that people enjoyed the sun standing.
No one sat or lay down: they were upright groups, talking and moving just for a swim.
The regulars behaved as if they were at a cocktail party, which led filmmaker Antonio Calmon to call the Sol a “sober cocktail” because the drink that circulated most there was mate.
At the same time, the Sol was the birthplace of Doces Bárbaros and the office of the theater group Asdrúbal Trouxe o Trombone. Nelson Motta, Cazuza, Lobão, Lulu Santos, Léo Jaime – they all shaped Brazilian rock and gave birth to bands like Blitz, Barão Vermelho and Kid Abelha.
Sonia Braga, an absolute star of Brazil at the time, frequented Sol unmolested – because everyone was famous there.
In the mid-1980s, with the reform of lifeguard stations on the beach, the former Sol Ipanema became known as Posto 9, bidding farewell to its mystique. But Sol as an “institution” did not survive beyond 1982. It was impractical on weekends because of overcrowding.
IPANEMA YESTERDAY AND TODAY
The beginning of the end of Ipanema’s avant-garde occurred in the 1970s. Over time, the boardwalk was taken over by monumental buildings, and the neighborly culture of small talk and serving small orders at the bar no longer had a place.
Once a bargain, the price per square foot became one of the most expensive in the country.
The swanky bars gave way to restaurants and bars with different influences, from Brazilian to Japanese.
The crystal blue sea, in which, according to actress Rosamaria Murtinho, you could even see the layers of nail polish on her toenails, has given way to murky waters.
Today, news about the pollution of the sea is not uncommon – at the end of 2021, it was reported that the sand smells of sewage.
The beautiful beach of Ipanema still attracts numerous fans and tourists. And one tradition from the classic years has remained: the applause at sunset in Arpoador.
It remains to be seen if there will be a new Girl from Ipanema among us.
We don’t think there is a new Girl from Ipanema or that we need one.
Everything that Leila Diniz did in the 60s can be done today by any girl, anywhere, without any problems.
And it gets even better: today all girls in Brazil are Girls from Ipanema