Getting from Santos Dumont Airport to the city

An airport you can walk out of

• Santos Dumont sits on reclaimed land on Guanabara Bay, next to the city centre. It is one of very few airports in the world where the sensible advice is to walk.
• Cinelandia and Carioca metro stations are a short walk away, which puts you on Line 1 to Copacabana, Ipanema and the Zona Sul without touching a bus.

The buses, for when you do want one

• Route 483, Penha to General Osorio, is the heavy one: 357 calls a day between 04:33 and 00:24. General Osorio is the Ipanema metro station, so this is the direct bus to Ipanema.
• SV474, Jacare to Copacabana, 05:48 to 22:28.
• 167, Terminal Gentileza to Urca, 04:54 to 21:13, for Sugarloaf.
• 169, Terminal Gentileza to General Osorio, 04:31 to 21:14.
• A dozen more routes terminate at Castelo, the terminal right beside the airport: 202, 232, 292, 298, 323, 327, 350, 362, 378, 2112, 2305 and others. If a route says Castelo, it comes here.
• Night routes with an SN prefix cover the small hours, for example SN298 to Acari and SN232 to Lins de Vasconcelos.

Santos Dumont versus Galeao

• Santos Dumont handles the domestic shuttle, above all the Rio to Sao Paulo Congonhas air bridge, plus other Brazilian cities.
• Galeao, 20 km north, handles the international flights and the larger domestic ones.
• If you have a choice, Santos Dumont saves an hour at each end. The approach over the bay past Sugarloaf is also one of the best in the world.

Practical

• The runway is short and hemmed in by water, which limits aircraft size and makes weather diversions to Galeao a real possibility.
• There is a strict slot and distance rule on which routes may use Santos Dumont, so the destination list changes with regulation rather than with demand.