The Selarón Steps: One Artist's 20-Year Tribute to Rio, Tile by Tile

The Selarón Steps, connecting Rio de Janeiro's Lapa neighborhood to the hillside district of Santa Teresa, weren't commissioned by the city or designed by a committee — they were one man's personal, decades-long project. Jorge Selarón, a Chilean-born painter and ceramist who settled in Rio's Lapa neighborhood in the 1980s, began tiling the run-down staircase outside his home in 1990, initially using tiles he scavenged from construction sites and urban waste around Rio.

What started as a solo, largely unfunded project — Selarón sold his own paintings just to keep buying materials — grew into something far bigger than he could have built alone. As word spread, visitors and admirers from around the world began bringing or mailing him tiles from their home countries specifically to add to the staircase. By the time of his death in 2013, the 215 steps, spanning 125 meters, held more than 2,000 tiles collected from over 60 countries, alongside his own hand-painted ceramic pieces, many featuring his recurring image of a pregnant woman.

The staircase wasn't universally welcomed at first — neighbors were reportedly unhappy about the bright colors when Selarón began — but it steadily became a genuine symbol of the neighborhood and, eventually, the city. In 2005, it was officially declared a Rio landmark, and it was later featured in the city's bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics, a formal recognition of how far the project had traveled from one man's front steps.

Jorge Selarón died in January 2013, found on the very staircase he'd spent 20 years building; he was 65. The steps remain exactly as he left them, still climbed daily by both residents and visitors moving between Lapa and Santa Teresa, and still cited as one of Rio's most distinctive pieces of public art precisely because it was never anyone's official project.

If you're visiting the Selarón Steps, resist the urge to just snap a photo from the bottom and move on — walking the full 215 steps slowly is worth it, since the tiles Selarón collected from dozens of countries reward a genuinely close look, not just a wide shot from street level.