With Olympic clean-up cancelled, Rio resigned to dirty bay

Naval carpenter Alexandro de Oliveira, 41, jumps from a boat in which he was doing a job to his boat house, on the waters of Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro Brazil, April 4, 2016. REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Visitors flocking to Rio de Janeiro for this summer's Olympic Games will find both dramatic landscapes and polluted, junk-filled water in the finger-like inlet that forms the city's shoreline and harbour.

Guanabara Bay, which carves into southeast Brazil from the Atlantic Ocean, literally gave the city its name when Portuguese mariners mistook it for a "rio," or "river." Four centuries later, the bay is preparing to welcome another sort of seafarer – Olympic sailors who will navigate it when Rio 2016 kicks off in August.