at a glance
a beach with a small fisherman's village at that time, it was known by the indigenous tupi name, sacopenapă, meaning 'flapping noise' or 'path of' socós', a type of bird very common in rio.
In the early seventeenth century, fishermen built a small chapel on the stone promontory of the current Copacabana Fort - Years later, an image of the Virgin of Copacabana, brought from the shores of Lake Titicaca, Bolivia, by silver merchants, was enthroned in the chapel.
while the source of the name is uncertain, some say that it is of Andean origin: 'copac' means blue, and 'cahuana' means lookout - merging into 'Copacabana' in bolivian spanish, or lookout into the blue.
