The bonde—Rio's yellow streetcar—has rattled up the Lapa arches and into Santa Teresa since 1877, when steam engines first hauled passengers over the Carioca Aqueduct. The line survived floods, fires, and a 2011 derailment that silenced the tracks for four years. When service resumed in 2015, the restored fleet carried fewer than twenty passengers per car, threading a two-kilometre loop from the city center to the crest of the hillside neighborhood that artists, writers, and exiles have called home for more than a century. Santa Teresa earned its bohemian reputation in the 1960s, when low rents and colonial architecture drew painters and musicians to the sloping streets. Today the district holds Brazil's largest concentration of ateliers per square kilometer, alongside mansions converted into boutique hotels and tile-fronted bars that spill onto uneven pavements. The tram passes the Parque das Ruínas—a skeletal estate offering 180-degree views over Guanabara Bay—and the Chácara do Céu museum, which houses modernist canvases by Di Cavalcanti and Portinari inside a 1950s residence designed by Wladimir Alves de Souza. At the base of Santa Teresa, the Escadaria Selarón descends in 215 hand-tiled steps from the bohemian quarter to the Lapa nightlife district. Chilean-born artist Jorge Selarón began covering the staircase in 1990, scavenging broken ceramics and requesting tile donations from visitors. By the time of his death in 2013, more than two thousand tiles from sixty countries formed a mosaic that spans yellow, green, and blue—the colors of the Brazilian flag—interspersed with mirrors, pottery fragments, and Selarón's own recurring motif of a pregnant African woman. The steps remain a living work; neighborhood residents continue to repair and add tiles in the artist's memory. A Santa Teresa tram tour typically pairs the bonde ride with a walking descent through the neighborhood's colonial core, crossing the aqueduct on foot and concluding at the Selarón Steps. The yellow trams depart every forty minutes during daylight hours, though schedules contract during maintenance windows and the cars do not run in heavy rain. Most guided tours begin in the morning to avoid midday crowds on the steps, which can exceed three hundred visitors during cruise-ship arrivals. The 06:00–09:00 window offers cooler temperatures and side-lit conditions for photographing the tilework, though the tram itself operates on a first-come basis and does not accept advance reservations for individual passengers.