Food for the Gods – Frank McNally on the highs and lows of Rio

“Christ and beaches” reads the ad for one of Rio de Janeiro’s more expensive city tours: a 10-minute helicopter ride costing about €160.

The “beaches” bit speaks for itself. The “Christ” is Christ the Redeemer: a 30-metre-high statue on the 700-metre summit of Corcovado mountain, sometimes now listed as one of the Seven Wonders of the modern world.

I did the Corcovado pilgrimage last Sunday by the more traditional method – a bus to the base of the summit, then a 220-step climb to the plinth.

We were too late for Mass – one had just ended. But that was no great loss, because between the thousands of other selfie-taking tourists and all the helicopters buzzing around doing their aerial stations of the cross, the place was somehow not conducive to spiritual well-being.

‘Worst morning of my life’ – Alison Healy on tricky tourists

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Custer’s Last Tune – Frank McNally on the dubious history of the ballad Garryowen

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Drama and spirituality – Desmond O’Neill on Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle

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Dutch gold – Frank McNally on a weekend in idyllic Amsterdam

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Far more peaceful, even at the weekend, was Rio’s other vertiginous viewing point: the 400-metre-high cone called the Sugarloaf. You ascend that by cable car, a queasy prospect for some of us, uneased by the local tour guide’s joking reassurance that the engineers involved were German, Italian, and Swiss, and “not Brazilian”.

I entertained myself in the queue beforehand by reading about an incident in 1951 when one of the cables snapped, leaving 21 of a group of 22 tourists dangling from the other one for 10 hours. Fortunately, the 22nd tourist was a fearless mechanic – and Brazilian! – who scrambled back down the extant cable and, according to Life magazine, “built” an emergency car to get the others off.

There was no such drama at the weekend. The modern ascent of the Sugarloaf feels almost disappointingly stable, and fast. But on a clear day, as ours was, the views from on top are staggering.

Rio – rightly designated a Unesco World Heritage Site – sprawls below you in all its chaotic glory: the famous beaches, the infamous favelas, the aeroplanes full of nervous passengers making a last turn between the mountains before landing at the domestic Santos Dumont airport, where the runway is reclaimed from the sea and just long enough for a good pilot to get a Boeing 737 down in one piece.

And of course you can see the “Cristo” from the Sugarloaf too, at least when it’s not covered by cloud. But then the great statue is almost omnipresent in central Rio, even at ground level. This Jesus, at least, seems to look down on you everywhere you go.

As for Rio’s beaches, those are a religion in themselves: places to worship or be worshipped, according to taste.

The cult of The Girl from Ipanema must be part of the reason for the extraordinary ubiquity of pharmacies in the city, where you can’t seem to walk 20 metres in any direction without yet another opportunity to buy emergency beauty supplies.

There really was a girl from Ipenema, by the way. A former model, she’s 77 now and has parlayed her fame into a fashion store near the beach, also called The Girl from Ipanema (but in Portuguese, obviously), and other businesses.

Her boutique was the subject of a court case some years ago when the songwriters claimed she couldn’t use the title in a commercial context. Unfortunately for them, they had been voluble over the years about the source of their inspiration in 1962. The case didn’t have a leg – tall, tanned, or otherwise – to stand on.

Such is the worship of sand in Rio, meanwhile, the locals even eat it. Or so it seemed at first sight and taste of Farofa, a Brazilian staple. Made from toasted cassava, it has the same golden colour and a very similar texture to the stuff that gets stuck to your feet in Ipanema or Copacabana.

But the grittiness does yield a certain flavour and Brazilians eat it like their daily bread. It is also an essential accompaniment to feijoada, the national dish, typically cooked at weekends and among family, like the Sunday roasts of Ireland.

Pronounced as in the Irish “feis” and “wada”, that centres on a stew of black beans and meat. In the version my friend and I tried, the meat comprised various elements of the pork family – “noble cuts only” we were assured.

But the dark, bubbling cauldron in which these were presented was so disturbingly reminiscent of the witches’ scene in Act 4 of Macbeth that I don’t think I’d ever want to meet the ignoble cuts, also popular with hardcore feijoada fans.

Brazilians speak of the dish with evangelical fervour. An Irish expat who’s been in Rio for 15 years was more qualified in her assessment. “Stodge”, she called it: “nice on a winter’s day, or if you have a hangover”. My jury is still out on feijoada as a whole. On the plus side, after eating it for breakfast several days’ running, I at least began to understand the locals’ appetite for edible sand.