Nowadays the world faces a serious environmental crisis and high poverty rates. Intending to minimize these problems, this thesis proposes the alternative usage of bamboo as reinforcement on columns of reinforced concrete, substituting steel in civil constructions. The reinforced concrete columns performance is described through a bibliographical revision and experiments done on short columns submited to axial load: three were built with bamboo and one with steel. Aspects related to the surcharge of longitudinal reinforcement, bamboo resistance to compression and adherence between bamboo and concrete are discussed extensively. With this purpose, subsequent experiments were made using small chips of bamboo submited to strong centered compression and also, Pull Out tests, utilizing the product Sikadur 32 gel to add adherence to bamboo and appraise its efficiency, were performed and compared to a body of proof built with steel. The concrete columns reinforced with bamboo and steel were thoroughly compared and analyzed. According to the pattern experiments, future developments on this research were proposed.