Topographic Map of Rio de Janeiro

Rio de Janeiro threads its neighbourhoods between granite domes and the sea, with the Tijuca massif rising as a forested block right inside the city. Few urban areas anywhere pack so much abrupt relief among the streets.

The terrain around Rio de Janeiro

Corcovado, Pedra da Gávea and the peaks of Tijuca — the largest urban forest in the world — top 1,000 m within the metropolitan area, while Sugarloaf and the Morros stand as isolated granite plugs at the harbour mouth. On the map these domes appear as tight, concentric rings scattered across the built plain and the curving Atlantic shoreline.

How this map was made

Every contour line traces a constant elevation drawn from public SRTM 30 m radar data, extracted with a marching-squares algorithm at a 50 m interval and coloured by height — cool blues in the valley climbing to warm reds on the summits. The satellite base layer and the contours share the same Web Mercator projection, so the lines fall exactly on the ground they describe.

You can regenerate this exact view — and change the interval, colours, resolution or export it as a print-ready SVG — directly in the TopoLines editor.