Christ the Redeemer is 90 years old today... so how was it built?
Brazil's statue of Christ the Redeemer sits on top of the 700-metre (2,300ft) Corcovado mountain overlooking the city of Rio de Janeiro.
Standing 30 metres (98ft) high, with arms stretching 28m (92ft) wide, the world-famous statue has become a cultural icon and was voted one of the New Seven Wonders of the World.
Christ the Redeemer took nine years to build. The idea for a Christian monument on Mount Corcovado was first floated by a priest in the mid-1850s to honour Princess Isabel, regent of Brazil and the daughter of Emperor Pedro II, but the proposal was dismissed after Brazil became a republic in 1889.
In 1920 a second proposal for a "Statue of the Christ" was made, motivated by so-called "godlessness" in society, and funded mainly by donations from Brazilian Catholics.
The statue was first made in France by French sculptor Paul Landowski, who created it in clay pieces.
Those pieces were then shipped to Brazil to be re-made with reinforced concrete by Brazilian engineer Heitor da Silva Costa and French engineer Albert Caquot.
Christ the Redeemer also has an outer shell made up of 6 million soapstone tiles – some said to have notes written on the back by the workers who made them.The statue sits high above Rio, and can be seen for miles. (GettyThe statue was made of concrete then covered in soapstone tiles. (Getty)
That would be more like around $3.6m (£2.6m) or more nowadays.
Materials were carried up the mountain using a railway, and workers reportedly used long wooden poles acting as scaffolding to construct the face of the statue.
The monument was officially opened on 12 October, 1931 – 90 years ago today.Restoration work started in 2010, including cleaning, replacing mortar and restoring iron in the internal structure.
In 2010 restoration work began, including cleaning the statue, replacing the mortar and soapstone on the exterior, restoring iron in the internal structure, and waterproofing it.
Christ the Redeemer was vandalised during this time, in what Mayor Eduardo Paes called "a crime against the nation".
The culprits, who had sprayed paint on the arm of the statue, later handed themselves in and apologised.