Sítio Roberto Burle Marx
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How it came to be
Roberto Burle Marx (1909 to 1994) was the landscape architect and painter who brought modernist landscape design to Brazil. In 1949 he and his brother Siegfried bought the Sítio Santo Antônio da Bica in Barra de Guaratiba, in the west of Rio de Janeiro. He went on expeditions into the rainforest with botanists to gather plants, and set up his garden, nursery and tropical plant collection here.
Over more than 40 years he used the site as a landscape laboratory for creating living works of art from native plants and modernist ideas. The traits that came to define his gardens grew here: sinuous forms, mass planting of a single species, dramatic colour contrasts, tropical plants and elements of folk culture. By the end of the 1960s it held the most representative collection of Brazilian plants.
Burle Marx lived here from 1973 until his death in 1994, and in 1985 he donated the property to IPHAN, Brazil's national heritage institute. Some 3,500 cultivated species now grow alongside the native Atlantic Forest, mangrove and restinga. In 2021 it became the first modern tropical garden inscribed on the World Heritage List.
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