Lapa and the Selaron Steps: A Night Out in Old Rio

Midnight under the Arcos da Lapa, and the whole quarter has become one open-air room. A band leans out of a doorway on Rua do Lavradio, someone is selling caipirinhas off a folding table for the price of a coffee, and the white arches throw the noise back at you, enormous and old. This is Lapa Rio de Janeiro nightlife at full volume, the loudest hour the city keeps, and it is a long way from the quiet hill you will sleep on. The whole trick, the only trick worth learning, is how to get from this to that at three in the morning.

Down the hill, into the noise

Vidigal goes up and quiet. Lapa goes down and loud. Those are the two poles of a night in Rio, and the smartest thing you can do with a stay on the hill is treat them as a round trip rather than a choice. Up here the party is a rooftop and a short walk to your own door. Down in Lapa, thirteen kilometers north along the water, the party is a whole neighborhood, a nineteenth-century bohemian quarter that Rio hands over to samba and cachaça every weekend and does not ask for back until dawn. You want both. You want the night that ends in a crowd under the arches, and you want the bed at the top of a hill with the bay under it. The gap between them is a ride, and this guide is mostly about crossing it well.

Lapa is not a single venue. It is a mood that runs a few blocks either side of the aqueduct, and it comes in registers. There is the free version, the street itself, thousands of people drinking on the pavement between Rua Mem de Sá and Rua do Lavradio. There is the ticketed version, the casas de show where a live band plays three floors of restored townhouse and you pay a cover to get in. And there is the older, rawer version a short walk away at Pedra do Sal, where the samba is free, the ground is cobblestone, and the whole thing feels closer to a family reunion than a night out. Most good Lapa nights touch two of these. The best ones touch all three, then go home to Vidigal before the sun comes up. Our guests at the condo tend to do Lapa once with real intent, love it, and then spend the rest of the week grateful they are not sleeping in the middle of it.

Set one honest thing down at the start. Lapa is a Rio institution and also a crowded, cash-heavy, occasionally rough patch of Centro at night. Come with small money, a cheap phone, and a plan for getting home, and it is one of the great nights out anywhere in South America. Come flashing an iPhone and a fat wallet and you are volunteering. First, the shape of the night and what it costs.

Everything in Lapa orients around the Arcos da Lapa, the great white aqueduct that has stood over this corner of Rio since the middle of the eighteenth century. It was built to carry water down from the Santa Teresa hills to the growing city, forty-two double arches marching across the low ground, and when the water stopped running it was handed to the little yellow bonde, the tram, which still rattles across the top of it on its way up the hill. By day the arches are a monument you photograph in ten minutes. By Friday night they are the backdrop to the largest open-air party in the city, and the single most reliable free thing to do in Lapa Rio has going for it.

Here is how the street version works, because it is the part first-timers underestimate. You do not need a ticket, a table, or a plan. The blocks around the arches simply fill, from ten at night until the small hours, with a slow river of people drinking, flirting, dancing to whatever spills out of the bars, and buying cheap caipirinhas from vendors who set up card tables along the curb. Friday is the biggest night, the one where the whole quarter turns into a single moving crowd. Saturday pulls a slightly more committed samba-club crowd indoors. Thursday is the soft, local, mellow opening. Sunday and the early week, Lapa mostly sleeps, and the street party you read about is not on, so time your visit for the back half of the week.

The street caipirinha deserves an honest paragraph of its own, because it is both the charm and the trap of a Lapa night. At seven or eight reais it is the cheapest good time in Rio, and there is nothing quite like a cold one in a plastic cup with the arches lit up over your head. But the cheap ones are cheap for a reason. The vendor working fast on a busy corner is heavy on ice and lime and light on the cachaça, or he is pouring the roughest cachaça he can buy, and either way you cannot always see what went in. The move is simple. Buy from a vendor you can watch pour, hold your own cup, and if you want to actually taste the drink rather than the ice, spend the extra few reais at a bar with a counter. Never take a drink you did not see made, and never leave one sitting while you dance. That is not Lapa-specific paranoia. It is just how you drink smart in any dense crowd, here or anywhere.

The crowd itself is the other thing to read. A Lapa Friday is joyous and packed and almost entirely made of people out to have exactly the night you are having. It also, being a packed street full of distracted tourists holding phones and cash, draws the small, patient economy of pickpockets that follows every great street party on earth. Nobody is going to bother you. Somebody might help themselves to whatever is loose in your back pocket while you are looking up at a band. The defense is boring and total. Front pockets, a zipped bag worn in front, a cheap phone, and enough cash for the night and not a real more. Do that and the only thing you will lose in Lapa is track of the time.

Two minutes uphill from the arches, where Lapa starts climbing toward Santa Teresa, a staircase of two hundred and fifteen steps runs up between the houses covered end to end in ceramic tile. This is the Escadaria Selarón, and it is the one thing in the neighborhood you should see by daylight and the one thing every guide to things to do in Lapa Rio gets slightly wrong by treating it as merely pretty. It is prettier than that, and stranger, and it has a story worth carrying up the steps with you.

The steps are the life's work of a single man. Jorge Selarón was a Chilean-born painter, born in 1947, who had wandered and worked through more than fifty countries before he settled in Rio in the early eighties and took a house at the foot of this run-down staircase. In 1990 he started tiling the crumbling steps outside his door, at first with broken ceramic he scavenged from building sites and rubbish piles around the city, in the blue, green and yellow of the Brazilian flag. Neighbors thought he was mad. He kept going anyway, and as the work grew famous, travelers began bringing him tiles from home, so that the staircase slowly filled with fragments from more than sixty countries, over two thousand of them, a hand-mortared map of everywhere the world came from to look at it. He called the steps my tribute to the Brazilian people, and he said, in the line everyone quotes, that he would only stop working on them the day he died.

He kept that promise more literally than he meant to. On the tenth of January 2013, Selarón was found dead on his own steps. The circumstances have never been fully settled, and the guides who narrate the staircase as a pure feel-good story tend to skip the ending, which is darker and sadder than the tiles let on. What is not in doubt is what he left. The city took the steps into its care as cultural heritage, they remain exactly as public and exactly as free as they were the day he started, and on any given morning they hold a slow scrum of people from everywhere, sitting on the Chilean red at the bottom, climbing toward the Santa Teresa top, each of them one more visitor to the tribute a stranger built by hand for a country that was not even his.

Who

Jorge Selarón, a Chilean painter who settled in Rio in the early 1980s and tiled the steps from 1990 until his death.

The count

215 steps, about 125 meters, more than 2,000 tiles gathered from over 60 countries.

Cost

Free, open, and public. No ticket, no gate, no closing time. Tip a street musician if one is playing.

When to go

Early morning or late afternoon on a weekday. Mid-day and weekends bring the tour-bus crush and the sharpest heat.

Where

Rua Joaquim Silva, the seam between Lapa and Santa Teresa. A few minutes on foot from the arches.

A word on when. The Selarón Steps Rio puts on its Instagram are shot at eight in the morning with nobody on them, and that is genuinely the window, before the coach tours arrive around ten and the staircase becomes a slow-moving photo queue. It is also, and this matters, a daytime sight in an area that is thin and quiet after dark. See the Escadaria Selarón as the opening act of a Lapa day, not the closing act of a Lapa night. Come in the morning for the tiles and the light, wander Santa Teresa and the antique street of Rua do Lavradio, eat somewhere unhurried, and let the same neighborhood turn itself up as the sun goes down. That is the honest sequence, and it puts the staircase and the samba in the same day without asking you to stand on an empty stair at midnight.

Selarón spent twenty-three years gluing the whole world onto a staircase and asked for nothing back but that you climb it. Rio has cheaper thrills. It has no better bargain. — what we tell first-time visitors

The samba houses — where the music has a roof and a cover

When the street gets to be too much, or when you want the music sat down and played properly rather than spilling out of a doorway, you go indoors to a casa de show. These are the samba clubs Lapa is genuinely famous for, restored old townhouses turned into multi-floor live-music halls, and two names anchor the scene. They are not interchangeable, and the difference is worth knowing before you pay a cover.

Rio Scenarium

The grand one. Rio Scenarium sits just off the main Lapa strip on Rua do Lavradio, three floors of a nineteenth-century building crammed with antiques, old clocks, film props and chandeliers, so that the room itself is half the show. A house band plays samba and gafieira to a floor that actually dances, a mixed crowd of cariocas and visitors, and it stays busy from when the doors open around seven in the evening until deep in the night. Cover runs in the region of thirty to forty-five reais depending on the night, lower midweek, higher on a Saturday, and some shows sell tickets ahead on Sympla for a little less. It is the most polished, most reliable, most tourist-legible samba night in Lapa, which is both the case for it and, on a purist's night, the case against it. Go once. It earns the visit. R$$

Carioca da Gema

The smaller, older, sweatier one, and the local's pick of the two. Carioca da Gema is a narrow, warm room on Avenida Mem de Sá, right in the thick of Lapa, and it has been putting serious samba bands on a tiny stage since the nineties. The happy-hour set in the early evening is often free or close to it before the cover kicks in later; after that you pay to be in a room where the band is close enough to touch and the whole place sings the choruses back. It holds fewer people than Rio Scenarium and it feels it, in the good way. If you only have the appetite for one paid samba night and you want the version with less varnish, this is the one. R$$

Around and between the two are the smaller anchors that keep the neighborhood honest. Beco do Rato, a bar built around an open-air roda, is the dependable, low-cover, high-authenticity option when the big houses feel like a production. Any number of forró bars and street-corner botequins fill the gaps. The pattern that works is to treat the cover-charge houses as one anchor of the night, not the whole of it. Pay to see a proper band for an hour or two, then go back out to the street, where the party is free and the crowd is the show. A night that is only indoors misses why people love Lapa. A night that is only the street misses the music at its best. You want the weave.

The free alternative — a roda at Pedra do Sal

If the covers and the tourist density of the main strip are not what you came for, the best night in this part of the city is not in Lapa at all. It is a short ride north, in the old port district of Saúde, on a set of stone steps called Pedra do Sal. This is holy ground for the music. It was in these blocks, in the Afro-Brazilian community that formed around the docks, that samba as we know it was effectively born, and the roda that gathers on the stone here is about as close to the root of the thing as a visitor can stand.

The essentials are simple and they are free. Musicians set up around a table on the cobbles, no stage, no amplification, no ticket, and play a roda de samba to a crowd that fills the little square and the steps above it. The two nights that matter are Monday and Friday, both getting going around seven in the evening, with Monday holding the reputation as the oldest and most devoted of the gatherings. You buy a can of beer or a caipirinha from a vendor for a few reais, cash only, and you stand shoulder to shoulder with a crowd that came for the music rather than the spectacle. It is rougher around the edges than a Lapa casa de show and infinitely more real. Same street-smarts apply, the same as anywhere, but the feeling is more neighborhood than nightlife, and for a lot of people it turns out to be the best night of the trip.

None of what follows is a reason to skip Lapa. It is the short list that keeps a great night from turning into a story you tell ruefully. Read it once, act on it without thinking, and forget it. That is how locals carry it, and it is why they are relaxed in a place that reads as chaotic to a first-timer.

The thing to understand about Lapa specifically is that it is a nightlife island. The few blocks around the arches are busy and policed and full of people on a weekend, and they are ringed by quieter, poorer stretches of Centro that are fine by day and not where you want to be wandering at two in the morning. That geography is the whole reason the ride home matters so much, and why the worst mistake you can make in Lapa is a decision that seems thrifty at the time, which is to walk. For the calmer, sober version of the whole after-dark question, our piece on whether it is safe to walk Vidigal at night covers the mindset that travels well to anywhere in the city.

Getting home to Vidigal, and why you do not walk

Here is the part that actually decides how your Lapa night ends, and it deserves more attention than the bar you drank in. Lapa sits in Centro. Vidigal sits thirteen kilometers south, out along the coast past Flamengo and Botafogo and the beaches. Between the two at three in the morning there is no walk worth taking and no bus you want, and the metro shuts before the party you came for even peaks. What there is, reliably and cheaply, is a ride app. This is what you use, every time, no exceptions, and knowing the shape of it before you are standing tired on a curb is most of getting it right.

Order an Uber or a 99 from inside a bar or a lit, busy spot, not from a dark corner, and wait for it there. The trip to the base of Vidigal runs roughly twenty to thirty minutes at that hour with the roads empty, and the fare lands somewhere around forty to seventy reais depending on the app, the hour, and whatever surge the weekend has cooked up. It can spike higher on a peak Saturday, and it is still the best money you will spend all night. Have the driver take you to Praça do Vidigal, the little square at the foot of the hill. From there you finish the climb the way the hill always finishes it, on the back of a moto-taxi for about ten reais, or on foot up the lit main road if the hour and your legs agree. Ride apps reliably bring you to the base. Whether a given driver wants to climb the hill itself varies, so plan on the base-of-the-hill handoff to a moto and treat anything more as a bonus.

Now the line in bold, because it is the one that matters most. Do not walk out of Lapa toward home, and do not let a cheap phone battery or a five-minute wait talk you into it. The stretch of Centro between the arches and anywhere you would find another ride is exactly the quiet, empty, poorly-lit kind of ground you spent all night correctly staying out of. Every seasoned visitor has the same rule and it is not negotiable. You wait for the car in the light, you get in, you go. If your phone is dead, ask the bar to call you one, or share a ride with people heading the same way. The fare is nothing against the value of arriving. For the wider picture of moving around the city, from the Jaé transit card to the metro to when the ride apps earn their keep, our guide to getting around Rio from Vidigal lays out the whole system.

This, in the end, is the quiet argument for sleeping on the hill rather than in the middle of Lapa. A stay in Vidigal means the loudest night in Rio is a cheap ride away when you want it, and a locked door and a silent view are waiting when you are done with it. You are never trapped in the party, and you are never far from it. Guests at our condo work this out fast. Lapa is a thing you go and do, brilliantly, once or twice in a week. Home is a hillside where the only sound at four in the morning is the wind and, on a Friday, a little bass drifting up from somewhere below.

The counter-night: staying up on the hill

Not every night in Rio needs to be a trek into Centro, and it would be a poor guide that sold you Lapa without telling you the alternative it sits against. The counter-night is the one you do not travel for at all. It starts with the sunset from a terrace near the top of Vidigal, runs through a slow dinner and a cold drink at a botequim where a resident is playing pagode on a Sunday, and ends with the shortest walk home in the city. No cover, no ride, no crowd, no watching your pockets. Just the hill doing quietly what Lapa does at volume. ← the trade is always noise for a walk home

The two nights are not rivals so much as a rhythm. The trick most of our guests land on by the third day is to alternate. A big Lapa Friday, loud and late and worth the ride, followed by a soft Saturday on the hill that reads as the small luxury it is precisely because the night before ended at dawn in Centro. Contrast is the whole secret of going out well in this part of Rio. If you want the full map of the hill's own after-dark scene, the sunset bars and the baile funk and the little botequins that are the real engine of a normal night up here, we wrote it all up in our guide to Vidigal nightlife and baile funk. And if you are still shaping the trip around all of it, our three days in Rio from a Vidigal base slots the Lapa night, the Selarón morning, and the quiet hill evenings into an order that actually works.

What you should not do is spend every night in Lapa. It is a wonderful place to visit and a wearing place to live, and the travelers who try to make it their whole Rio come home tired and a little robbed. Go for the arches and the samba and the free roda on the stone. Take the Selarón steps in the morning light with the story in your head. Then get in the car and come back up the hill, where the party is over and the view is not, and sleep like the city forgot you were there.

The thing to carry home is that Lapa is not a checklist of bars. It is one enormous, generous, slightly unruly night that the city throws every weekend, with a hand-tiled staircase and a birthplace of samba folded into the same few blocks. See it properly. Drink the street caipirinha and climb the Selarón steps and stand in a free roda until you understand what all the fuss is about. Then do the one smart thing the night asks of you, which is to get in a car when it is over and let it carry you back up the hill to a bed with the whole bay under it.