What Is a Favela? The Honest Explainer

A favela is an urban neighbourhood built incrementally by its own residents outside the formal systems of planning permission and land title. Brazil's census defines the category by physical and legal characteristics — untitled land, irregular layout, self-built housing, incomplete public services — not by the income or character of the people living there. In 2022 there were 12,348 favelas and urban communities in Brazil, home to 16.39 million people.

No. Favela is the correct, current Portuguese word, and since 2024 it is also the official census term: IBGE publishes the category as Favelas e Comunidades Urbanas, having dropped the fifty-year-old label aglomerados subnormais (“subnormal agglomerations”) that residents had long objected to. Many residents use favela with pride; others prefer comunidade. Both are fine.

Avoid slum and shanty town, which imply impermanence and squalor that do not describe brick-and-concrete neighbourhoods a century old with metered electricity, broadband, registered businesses and property markets. Avoid ghetto, which implies legal segregation by identity rather than economic segregation by a housing market. In English, the safest option is to use the community's own name — Rocinha, Vidigal, Santa Marta.

About 13.3% of the city's population — roughly one resident in seven — across around 1,700 identified favelas and urban communities. Nationally the figure is 16.39 million people, or 8.1% of Brazil's population, up from 11.4 million (6.0%) recorded in the 2010 Census under the previous terminology.

Rocinha, with 72,021 residents and 30,371 occupied permanent households recorded in the 2022 Census — the most populous favela in Brazil. Sol Nascente in the Federal District is comparable or larger depending on whether you count people or households, so the “biggest in Brazil” title depends on the measure used.

From a plant. Soldiers returning from the Canudos War in 1897 had camped near a hill in Bahia covered in favela, a skin-irritating shrub. Denied the land they had been promised in Rio, they occupied a hill near the Ministry of War and named it Morro da Favela after that Bahian hillside. It is now called Morro da Providência and is recognised as Brazil's first favela.

Some communities are controlled or contested by armed groups and the violence behind Rio's homicide statistics is concentrated in those places; many others are not, and daily life in them is ordinary. “Favela” is far too coarse a unit to make a safety decision with — it covers around 1,700 communities with very different situations. Never enter one independently without a local contact; go with a resident guide, on foot, in daylight, or not at all.

Because the hills were the land nobody with capital wanted — too steep for conventional construction — which made them the only ground available to people with no money and no title. That is why Vidigal, Santa Marta, Cantagalo and Rocinha sit directly above some of the most expensive real estate in Brazil, and why they have the better views.

It depends entirely on the format. A walking tour with a guide who lives there, in a community that has chosen to receive visitors, where you spend money locally and a share of the fee stays in the community, is a neighbourhood tour and is defensible. An open-top jeep driving through residential streets so outsiders can photograph homes without stopping or spending is what residents call a human safari, and it is not.

Nothing, in terms of what the place is — comunidade (community) is the preferred term for many residents and organisations, and favela is the term the state now uses officially. Choosing between them is a question of register rather than definition. Both are widely used in Rio, often by the same person in the same conversation.