As you travel through Brazil's World Heritage sites, the name Roberto Burle Marx keeps on popping up. Almost as much as Oscar Niemeyer! A world-renowned garden designer, landscape architect, botanist, conservationist, painter, and tapestry weaver, Burle Marx's work features in several other Brazilian WH sites including Brasilia, Pampulha, and Rio. So in a way, it was quite fortunate for us that visiting his estate home, studio, acreage, and artistic legacy on the outskirts of Rio came near the end of our Brazil trip, rather than at the start.

Exploring the house, gardens, and studio on a guided tour gives you a fantastic insight into the man himself, his artistic development, and his passion for the incredible plants and landscapes of his beautiful homeland that so heavily inspired his works. Personally, I really enjoyed that the house and gardens have been preserved essentially as they were when Burle Marx died, so you can really see the final evolution of his ideas. And his tapestries and paintings on the walls are excellent too, showing the development from realism into Picasso-esque abstract designs.

Tickets - very important!

Visits to the property are only available via guided tours during 09:30-13:30 Tuesday through Saturday, and must be booked in advance. Reservations are done via their website: https://sitio-roberto-burle-marx.reservio.com/. They release an entire month of tickets at once, in the last week of the previous month (so for this September, tickets will be released 23rd August). Tickets get snapped up fairly quickly, so don't leave it to the last minute. There's options for both Portuguese and English, though the English groups are limited in size (8-10 people vs 30 people). Our preferred timeslot only had Portuguese available, but once on-site we were lucky enough to join the English tour thanks to a late cancellation. Tickets were still R$10 each, paid in cash on site.

Logistics

As mentioned in Jarek's review below, the Sitio is on the far western outskirts of Rio and getting there can be quite a mission. Rather than pay a fortune for an Uber from central Rio or Copacabana, we decided to ride the safe and clean Metro to the final stop (Jardim Oceanico) and hail an Uber from there. It was R$45 and about 45 minutes from Jardim Oceanico to the Sitio, while the return back to Jardim Oceanico was R$40 and 45 minutes. I had been slightly concerned that Ubers might not exist that far out of the city, but the metro station is a transit hub for all the people living further out of town, and both of our requests were answered within a few minutes. If you get desperate, there's also a Brazilian-specific Uber competitor called 99, though we never actually needed to use it during our month in Brazil.