Tuesday · August · 11 · 2026
“O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time.”
— W. H. Auden
Sun & daylight
The sun rises at 06:22 and sets at 17:36 in Rio de Janeiro today, giving 11h 14m of daylight. Solar noon is at 11:59.
06:22
Sunrise
11:59
Noon
17:36
Sunset
Midnight
23:59
Sunrise
06:22
Solar noon
11:59
Sunset
17:36
Solar midnight
23:59
Daylight
11h 14m
Daylight runs about 10h 43m around the June solstice and 13h 32m around the December solstice.
Daylight saving time
Rio de Janeiro does not observe daylight saving time. Clocks stay on UTC−3 all year, so the local time never shifts with the seasons.
Public holidays
Brazil has no public holidays in August 2026.
Architecture
Rio builds against granite hills and a shoreline that leaves little flat ground, so its buildings tend to sit on raised platforms and take their shape from a view. Brazilian modernism began here before it moved inland to Brasília.
Completed 2015
Santiago Calatrava
A science museum at the end of a pier in the old port, built before the 2016 Games. Calatrava cantilevered a spined roof seventy-five metres over the plaza and forty-five metres toward the water, carrying photovoltaic fins that move to follow the sun. Cooling water is drawn from the bay and returned to the reflecting pools. It was placed to pull the city back to a waterfront an elevated motorway had cut off for forty years.
Completed 2013
Christian de Portzamparc
A concert hall and cultural complex in Barra da Tijuca, the flat district west of the old city. Portzamparc raised the building on a terrace ten metres up and set the halls on it as separate boxes, held between two horizontal slabs with curved fins framing the sea and the hills. The platform, not the auditorium, is the organising idea. In a district built around car traffic, it makes a public floor where the street cannot provide one.
Completed 1984
Oscar Niemeyer
A permanent parade ground for Carnival, replacing the temporary stands that had been erected and dismantled every year. Niemeyer lined a seven-hundred-metre stretch of existing street with concrete grandstands and closed the end with a raised slab over an open plaza, the Praça da Apoteose. It went up in four months. Between Carnivals the structure is a school and a public space, which was the condition for building it in concrete at all.
Completed 1979
Edgar de Oliveira da Fonseca
The Catholic cathedral of Rio, a truncated concrete cone in the business district. Fonseca took the form from Mesoamerican stepped pyramids, left the exterior in raw ribbed concrete, and cut four stained glass strips the full height of the interior. There are no columns inside and no fixed direction to the room. The plan is a circle rather than a cross, which puts twenty thousand people at the same distance from the altar.
Completed 1945
Lúcio Costa · Oscar Niemeyer
A government ministry in the centre of Rio, built for education and health. Costa's team raised the slab on ten-metre pilotis, glazed the north face and fitted it with movable concrete louvres, the first use of the brise-soleil at this size. Le Corbusier was flown in for four weeks in 1936 to advise, and the team then departed from his sketches. With gardens by Roberto Burle Marx and tiles by Cândido Portinari, it is where Brazilian modernism became its own thing.