How tall is Christ the Redeemer?

Christ the Redeemer's height: 30 m statue, 38 m monument

Christ the Redeemer (Cristo Redentor), the Art Deco statue of Jesus above Rio de Janeiro, is 30 m (98 ft) tall. It stands on an 8 m pedestal, so the whole monument rises 38 m (125 ft). These are the figures from the official sanctuary that manages the site. This page uses 30 m, the figure alone, as the headline height, which matches how the world's large statues are usually compared.

The arms stretch about 28 m from fingertip to fingertip, nearly equal to the height, so the statue's outline is close to a perfect cross. That is also why this site lists its width as 28 m.

The mountain doubles the effect

On its own, a 30 m statue would be impressive but not extraordinary. What makes Christ the Redeemer visible from much of Rio is where it stands: on the summit of Corcovado, a granite dome about 710 m high in the middle of the city, inside Tijuca National Park. The name means "hunchback" in Portuguese, after the peak's curved profile.

Put the numbers together and the top of the statue's head sits about 750 m above sea level. From Copacabana or Botafogo Bay you're looking up roughly three-quarters of a kilometer, which is why the statue looks far larger in photos than 30 m suggests. In height comparisons this site stands every landmark on the same ground line, so the 3D figure shows the statue only, with no mountain.

Who made it, and how

The project grew out of a Catholic campaign in the early 1920s for a monument in Rio, then Brazil's capital. Several people shaped the result:

• Heitor da Silva Costa, a Brazilian engineer, won the design competition and led the project. His concept was refined over several years into the final open-armed pose.
• Paul Landowski, a French sculptor, modeled the statue in clay.
• Gheorghe Leonida, a Romanian sculptor working in Paris, sculpted the face.
• Albert Caquot, a French engineer, designed the reinforced-concrete structure that carries the figure.

The official sanctuary explains why concrete was chosen over the metal frames used for statues like the Statue of Liberty. It was cheaper, and it avoided a metal structure that could be taken apart and melted down in wartime. Over the concrete shell, workers laid a mosaic of thousands of small triangular soapstone tiles, a durable local stone that is easy to cut and holds up well in Rio's humid, salty air. The sanctuary notes that even the statue's heart, on the inside, is faced in soapstone and measures 1.30 m.

Construction dates

Sources give slightly different start dates. Wikipedia gives 1922 to 1931, counting from the project's launch and foundation work. The sanctuary's own fact page says the statue was built from 1926 to 1931, and other references date the main construction to 1927. All agree it was inaugurated on 12 October 1931. The sanctuary puts the cost at 2,500 contos de réis, which it equates to about R$9.5 million today.

Lightning: the cost of being the highest point

A 38 m concrete figure on top of a 710 m peak attracts lightning. Strikes are a regular event. Notable strikes in 2008 and 2014 damaged the head and chipped the fingertips. Repairs involve replacing damaged soapstone tiles with matching stone, and lightning protection was improved during later restorations. The 2010 restoration also cleaned and repaired the mosaic over the whole surface.

The structure is built for more than storms. The sanctuary says it is designed to withstand winds of up to 250 km/h. Wind is a constant force on an exposed summit with 28 m of outstretched arms acting like a sail.

How Christ the Redeemer compares with other landmarks and statues

The statue's fame can make it seem bigger than it is. Next to other statues and monuments in this site's landmark data, it is mid-sized. You can compare them directly in the 3D height comparison tool.

The Statue of Liberty is the most natural comparison. Measured figure to figure, Lady Liberty's 46 m copper body, torch included, is about half again as tall as Christ's 30 m. Measured to the top of the whole monument, Liberty's 93 m is more than double Christ's 38 m. But Liberty stands near sea level in New York Harbor and Christ stands on a 710 m mountain, so in the views people actually see, Rio's statue towers far higher over its city.

Taller statues of Christ

Christ the Redeemer is the most famous statue of Jesus, not the tallest. Later monuments have been built taller on purpose, including Cristo de la Concordia in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and Christ the King in Świebodzin, Poland. Both are listed alongside Rio's statue as comparable works. Neither stands on anything like Corcovado, which is why neither has Rio's reach.

Which number should you quote?

Because the monument sits on a pedestal and the pedestal sits on a mountain, at least four different figures circulate, and each answers a different question.

• 30 m is the statue alone, from the feet to the top of the head. Use it to compare Christ the Redeemer with other statues, such as the 46 m copper figure of the Statue of Liberty or the faces of Mount Rushmore.
• 38 m is the full monument, statue plus 8 m pedestal. Use it to compare with buildings and towers that are measured from the ground, such as Big Ben's 96 m.
• About 710 m is the summit of Corcovado. It describes the mountain, not the statue, and is often misquoted as the statue's "height".
• About 750 m is the approximate elevation of the top of the head above sea level. It explains why the statue is visible across so much of the city.

A common mistake is to add the arm span to the height or to quote the 28 m span as the height. The span is a width, and this site records it separately. Another is to compare the 38 m monument with the Statue of Liberty's 46 m figure, which mixes a pedestal-included height with a figure-only one. When the comparison is like for like, 30 m against 46 m or 38 m against 93 m, Liberty is the larger statue both ways.

Concrete versus copper: why Rio's statue is so heavy

Christ the Redeemer and the Statue of Liberty are the two statues most often compared, and their weights show how differently they were built.

The National Park Service gives Liberty's copper as about 176,000 lb and her framework as about 440,000 lb, roughly 280 tonnes together. Christ the Redeemer is only two-thirds as tall, yet at about 635 tonnes it weighs more than twice as much. The difference is the material. Liberty is a thin metal skin hung on a frame, essentially a hollow sculpture. Rio's statue is a concrete structure, with the soapstone tiles as its outer surface.

That weight is an advantage on a mountaintop. A heavy, stiff concrete figure resists the strong winds that sweep across Corcovado, and the sanctuary's design figure of 250 km/h reflects that. Liberty's builders took the opposite approach. The NPS notes that her flexible frame lets the statue sway up to 3 inches and the torch up to 6 inches. Both are valid engineering answers to wind: one resists it with mass and stiffness, the other gives way to it.

The materials also explain the colors. Liberty's copper turned from brown to green within about three decades as it oxidized. Christ the Redeemer's pale soapstone has kept the light gray-white tone it had in 1931, apart from weathering and cleaning, which is why the statue stands out so brightly against the green of the Tijuca forest and the sky.

The statue at human scale

Some proportions help make the size real. The official sanctuary gives each foot as 1.35 m long, the height of an average eight- or nine-year-old child. The head alone weighs 30 tonnes, about as much as five adult African elephants. Compared with an average Brazilian man of 173.6 cm (see our Brazil average height data), the 30 m statue is scaled up about 17 times. At that scale the 28 m arm span would match a man's arm span of about 1.6 m, close to normal human proportions, with the arm span slightly shorter than the height.

Visiting the summit of Corcovado

There are three main ways up:

• The Corcovado rack railway. The official operator says it has run since 1884, making it the oldest tourist railway in Brazil, and it carries more than 1.5 million people a year to the statue. The 3.8 km line starts at Cosme Velho station and climbs through the Tijuca forest. Trains run about every 20 minutes, but waits can stretch to hours in peak season.
• Road access. Authorized vans and shuttles drive up to the summit area from points in the city.
• On foot. A steep trail through the forest starts at Parque Lage. Hikers should check current safety advice and go in daylight.

From the upper terminus, visitors reach the terrace at the statue's feet by 223 steps, or by the elevators and escalators added in 2003. The small chapel inside the pedestal, consecrated in 2006, holds services and weddings.

The best time to go is a clear morning. Corcovado is often wrapped in cloud, and on those days the 30 m figure can disappear entirely from the city below, and even from the terrace at its feet. When the cloud lifts, the view takes in Sugarloaf Mountain, Guanabara Bay, downtown Rio, and the beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema. The official sanctuary also runs a 360-degree virtual visit for anyone who can't make the climb.

For more statues and monuments to compare, browse the landmarks hub.