Foundations

The largest favelas in Brazil

Brazil's 2022 census ranked the country's favelas by population for the first time under the IBGE's new category. Rocinha is still the largest — but the list looks far less like Rio than most people expect.

The top 20

The table lists the twenty most populous favelas and urban communities identified by the IBGE in the 2022 census. Names follow the IBGE's delineation, which sometimes groups several locally named neighborhoods under one unit and sometimes splits what residents think of as one place into several.

What the ranking shows

Rocinha is still first, narrowly

Rocinha's place at the top confirms its long-standing reputation, but the margin is small: Sol Nascente, on the western edge of Ceilândia in the Federal District, is only about 1,100 residents behind. Sol Nascente is also much larger in area and far younger — most of its growth dates from the 1990s onward, while Rocinha's dense hillside fabric took shape between the 1950s and 1980s.

Manaus, not Rio, dominates the list

Seven of the twenty most populous favelas are in Manaus, the capital of Amazonas — more than any other city. This reflects the scale of informal growth in the Amazonian capitals since the 1970s, when the Manaus Free Trade Zone drew migrants from the interior and from other states. Amazonas is also the state with the highest share of its population living in favelas: 34.7 percent, against a national average of 8.1 percent. Belém, with two entries, shows a similar pattern in Pará, where low-lying baixadas along rivers and channels were settled informally.

São Paulo has the most residents, Rio the most famous names

The state of São Paulo has the largest absolute favela population in Brazil (3.6 million), and four of its favelas are in the top twenty, including Paraisópolis and Heliópolis in the capital and two in the ABC industrial suburbs, São Bernardo do Campo and Mauá. Rio de Janeiro state has 2.1 million favela residents and three entries: Rocinha, Rio das Pedras, and Jacarezinho.

Why Maré and Alemão are not on the list

Readers often expect to see Complexo da Maré or Complexo do Alemão near the top. Both are larger than Rocinha when treated as single places — Maré's own community census counted around 130,000 people across sixteen communities. But the IBGE counts the communities inside such complexos as separate favelas, so each appears with a smaller figure. Any ranking of "largest favelas" depends on whether complexes are treated as one unit or many; the IBGE's ranking ranks individual favelas, not complexes.

Census figures versus local estimates

Many favelas have long been described with larger numbers than the census gives: 100,000 or more for Rocinha and Heliópolis, 80,000 to 100,000 for Paraisópolis. These figures usually come from residents' associations, utility connections, or municipal housing surveys that draw wider boundaries. The census figures are the only ones produced with a consistent national method, and they are the ones used here, but the disagreement is long-running and is discussed in Census and demographics.

How big is Rocinha?

Rocinha had 72,021 residents in 2022 on roughly 1.4 square kilometers of steep hillside between Gávea and São Conrado — a density several times that of most of Rio's formal neighborhoods. It has been an officially recognized bairro of the city since 1993. See the full Rocinha entry.