Rio de Janeiro city is sited on a rugged relief and has a tropical climate. The meteoric processes that take place on its lithology generate the residual and transported soils. Accounting for its limited flat urban space, its habitants tend to live in steep slope areas where such soils are present. For a long time studies have taken place to characterize mass movements and their conclusions relate most of them to the loss of soils matric suction. Therefore the study aims to obtain the unsaturated soil parameters in a simple, rapid and low cost way, which may help future studies of water infiltration on slopes. And thus, 6 locations in Rio de Janeiro were choosen based on the criteria of soil formation, attending different types of gneissic bedrocks. The constitutive model used was the van Genuchten and the method to obtain three of its five parameters was by solving an inverse problem. The curve to be optimized comes from the monitored infiltration test which consists on the record of the matric suction over a constant head infiltration test.