They’re making a giant artificial waterfall off the beach of Copacabana that you can bungee jump from!

The Creators Project:

As Brazil readies itself for the upcoming 2014 World Cup, an even larger global sporting event looms just a couple more years in the future. In conjunction with the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, several new structures will be erected in Rio’s cityscape. One of the many projects creating huge buzz is the Solar City Tower, an artificial waterfall designed to generate clean, renewable energy.

Designed by Swiss firm, RAAFA, Solar City Tower won the architecture competition for the 2016 Olympic Games. Inspired by Olafur Eliasson’s Waterfall series, the Solar City Tower will be built on Cotunduba, one of the islands in Rio’s Guanabara Bay.

The vertical structure will be used as an observation tower, and it will capture and distribute solar power to the Olympic Village and to the city. The 345 foot structure will have solar panels around its base, used to store energy during the day, releasing it through turbines for use at night. For special occasions, the turbine will pump seawater into the tower and then shoot it back out to sea, creating a waterfall effect in the middle of the ocean.

Looks like this could be a half decent City of God rip off, set in Salvador, Bahia in the 50s, this is Captains of the Sand.

The Ashaninka are one of the largest indigenous groups in South America, their ancestral homelands ranging from Brazil to Peru. Since colonial times, their existence has been difficult — they have been enslaved, had their lands taken away or destroyed, and were caught up in the bloody internal conflict in Peru during the late 20th century. Today, a large communal reserve set aside for the Ashaninka is under threat by the proposed Pakitzapango dam, which would displace some 10,000 Ashaninka.

Photo by Mike Goldwater: Ashaninka girls will raise this orphaned baby pig. A litter of piglets was found by a hunting party after they killed two boars near the River Envira, in Acre Province, Brazil. 

Click through to the Atlantic for a heap more photos

Check out these amazing photos of the construction of Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia. (Click on the thumbs for high res) They were taken by Marcel Gautherot and are from a new book called Building Brasilia. Click for a little interview with the architect that i posted a while little back.