How the directory is checked

What is in the directory

3,396 Rio buildings, each joined to the Prefeitura do Rio's open records on the official street code and door number. Of those, 3,070 have a surveyed height, 96 are heritage listed and 275 are protected addresses. Recorded apartment sales cover 375 streets.

112 landmark pages also carry a written history. Each was checked claim by claim in November 2026 against 440 sources, which are listed on the page and numbered in the text. Anything we could not prove came off the page. A short page here means we found little that we could stand behind.

City records

Door-number register

Floors, registered use, postal code and the point on the map. The city's own building name sometimes differs from the name people use. Its use codes are not published with the data, so we decoded residential, mixed and commercial from a sample of 3,148 addresses.

2019 building survey

Footprint and the elevation of each roof and base. Height is the highest roof part minus the lowest base of parts that overlap in plan. We leave height out when it does not fit the floor count (under 2.2 m or over 6.8 m a floor), because a door point can land on the wrong polygon. Anything built after 2019 is missing or out of date. Height ranks compare only the buildings in this directory, not every building on the street.

Official bairro boundaries

Rio's legal neighbourhood lines rarely match what people and estate agents say. A building in everyday "Lagoa" can be in another bairro on paper. Where the two differ, the page shows both.

All city data is published by the Prefeitura da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro through data.rio under CC BY 4.0. Our join is free to reuse on the same terms, with credit to the Prefeitura and to BuyInRio: download the CSV.

Recorded sales

When property changes hands in Rio, the buyer pays a transfer tax called ITBI. The city's finance department publishes the results by street and year: number of sales, average built area, average value. It counts purchase and promise-of-purchase deals, which the city says make up over 95% of all transfers.

• These are street averages, never the price of a particular apartment or building.
• Our R$ per m² divides the street's average value by its average area. A long avenue mixes very different blocks, and a few large apartments can move a year's average.
• The figures are values recorded for tax, which can differ from what was paid.
• We show apartments only, and only years with at least 5 sales, so no single home can be picked out. The current year is partial and drawn lighter.

Asking prices shown on a few pages are a different thing, and are labelled with their date.

Heritage protection

The city's heritage register lists three levels, and the page quotes the law the city gives for each one:

Listed (tombado)

The building itself is protected by the city, the state, the federal government or a mix of them. Under federal Decree-Law 25 of 1937, article 17, a federally listed property may not be destroyed or demolished, or repaired, painted or restored without prior authorization. State and city listings have their own rules.

Protected address

An address the city names inside a protected area (APAC), with a grade from 1 to 5. We print the grade as the city does. We have not found an official public definition of the grades, so ask the city's heritage office what yours allows.

Inside a heritage area

The door point falls inside the boundary of an APAC. Rules may still apply to works here.

Before you buy anything on this list, check with the city's heritage institute (IRPH) and your lawyer what you may change. This page is a guide, not legal advice.

Pictures

Photos are of the building named, chosen by eye from Wikimedia Commons, with the licence read live from the Commons record and credited on the page. We use public domain, CC0, and CC BY or BY-SA 3.0 and 4.0 only. A few exterior photos come from earlier permissioned sources.

Where we have no photo we can use, the page shows a drawing: every block is a polygon from the 2019 survey at its surveyed height, the building in question in a warm colour. Nothing in the drawings is invented or generated. If we could not prove which door is the building, no block is highlighted and no city figures are shown.

What this directory does not do

• It does not say that a named building is safe, legal or well run. Ask for the condominium's records.
• It does not name living people at their homes, even when the press has. People are listed only if a source ties them to the building, and the living only as hotel guests.
• The names of some minor buildings come straight from the city's door file, and a few are shops or offices in a building. Where the file holds a surveyor's note instead of a name, the page uses the address.
• The same building can appear under two neighbourhoods because a street crosses a boundary. Those pages point to one home page.

Corrections

If something is wrong, tell us and send a source if you have one. We fix errors and date the page. The November 2026 check made 259 corrections to what these pages used to say, and removed 855 claims we could not support.