It’s their urban Garden of Eden, but residents of Rio de Janeiro’s most unusual neighborhood face the same fate as the inhabitants of the Biblical version: expulsion.
Unknown even to many who call Brazil’s second biggest city home, the community of Horto is tucked away in a corner of Rio’s lush Botanical Gardens.
Trees are festooned in yellow, pink and white blossoms, seemingly a world away from the nearby noisy, traffic-clogged streets.
Jungle-like vines snake up telegraph poles and green parrots dart overhead. A large monkey leaps from branch to branch and in the humid air the loudest sound is birdsong.
“This is paradise,” says Nelia Vasconcelos, 61, one of Horto’s 3,000 inhabitants. But the authorities, backed by the courts, don’t see it that way.
For them, Horto is one of Rio’s many squats, only more serious than other illegal land occupations because it sits in UNESCO-listed gardens, a piece of the city’s most magical real estate and a research center of international importance.
“What cannot be allowed is people living inside the perimeters,” the garden’s director, Sergio Besserman, told AFP.
“Sorry, but is there a botanical garden in the world where you have people living inside?
Can you imagine someone living inside (London’s) Kew Gardens or someone in the Paris botanical garden or in New York?”
With eviction looming, the community’s days of innocence appear numbered. Leading the way down leafy lanes, Vasconcelos points to a jarring sight: piles of hefty logs and dozens of car tires. Similar heaps — materials to build instant barricades against police — are stationed at other strategic points.
“We’re a peaceful community,” Vasconcelos, a retired university administrator, says. “Or we’re peaceful until they try and take our rights.”
