About 20 percent of Rio’s 5.6 million population live in the city’s 750 favelas. Yesterday, Sofie and I visited Rocinha, Rio’s largest favela, with a group called Favela Tour. According to our guide, Marina Schultze, Rocinha is the largest favela in South America with an official population of 60,000 and unofficial estimates as high as 180,000. The people of Rocinha live packed into a jumble of odd-shaped brick and concrete homes squeezed into about one square kilometer on the side of a mountain next to the city’s exclusive São Conrado neighborhood.

Rocinha has one main road that is often filled with cars, buses, and of course, people. The best way to get around the favela is on a motorcycle and there are plenty of those driving up and down the winding hillside that was once used as part of a Formula One race course. The motorcyclists act as couriers and taxis transporting people and goods around the favela. They also act as couriers, messengers and lookouts for the favela’s drug dealers. The main area where the motorcyclists congregate, on the edge of the favela just at the bottom of this street (pictured above), was off limits to photographers.

Probably the most surprising aspect of our visit to Rocinha was just how many goods were on offer there. It was almost a city within a city, with hairdressers, bars, restaurants and stores as well as plenty of garages for repairing motorcycles. Rocinha even has a private cable television station, a radio station, two community newspapers and two official banks. Apprently there was a McDonalds until two years ago when gang warfare errupted in the favela between the ruling gang, Red Command, and another gang known as the ADA or Amigos dos Amigos (friends of the friends). The ADA has been in power ever since.

(Sorry for this blurry shot of one of the motorcycle couriers, but it was a bumpy road and this was taken from the back of our van. You can tell if a rider works for a drug gang because the license plate is missing from the back of his bike.)

According to our guide the gangs guarantee a semblance of security in the favela. You are much more likely to get robbed in Copacabana or in Ipanema than in Rocinha because the drug gangs don’t want trouble (and the added inconvenience of the police) to interrupt their business. As an example of just how much control the gangs have over Rocinha, our guide told us that a group of corrupt police officers tried to rob one of the banks in Rocinho a few years ago but they were repelled by one of the gangs. Although the gangs do not tolerate petty crime they do turn a blind eye to other problems like the domestic violence that goes hand in hand with the alcoholism among the favela’s residents.

Perhaps surprisingly, rents in Rocinha can be quite high. A house near the main road, and therefore close to transport and amenities, can cost up to 600 reais a month (about $300). Apart from the one road there are only three additional streets in Rocinha. Everyone else must commute to and from the city and the shops via very narrow, winding alleyways. Most people do have access to water and electricity. Those wires you can see even include blue cables for broadband Internet.

This is what chaos looks like. Both in this favela, and in the much smaller Vila Canoas that we visited later in the day, the system for getting electricity and phone lines to people’s homes looked like something out of a city planner’s nightmare. I have to say that during our entire time in both favelas we never felt intimidated and most people were exceedingly friendly, though having a guide along was extremely reassuring. I would not attempt a trip to Rocinha on my own.

(I can’t vouch for other companies but I can say that our visit with Favela Tour was well worth the 65 reais fee. Just for the sake of transparency, Sofie and I paid for our tour.)