São Paulo

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  São Paulo answers to a Latin motto: Non ducor, duco, which translates as "I am not led, I lead." The phrase fits a city that grew from a hilltop mission of twelve priests into the most populous city in Brazil, in South America, in the Americas, and in both the Western and Southern Hemispheres. Founded in 1554, it is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on the American continent. Yet for two centuries it stayed poor and isolated, the only colonial village in Brazil's interior, reachable only by a hard climb up the Serra do Mar. How did this remote settlement become the largest urban economy in Latin America and home to the world's largest Italian, Arab, and Japanese diasporas? What turned a place of subsistence crops into a financial capital, and who were the people who pushed it outward from its plateau?

• 2. Priests On A Hill

  ›

  On the 25th of January 1554, the Colégio de São Paulo de Piratininga was founded on the feast day of the conversion of the Apostle Paul of Tarsus. The Jesuit college of twelve priests included Manuel da Nóbrega and the Spanish priest José de Anchieta. They built their mission on a steep hill between the Anhangabaú and Tamanduateí rivers, starting with a small structure of rammed earth made by Native workers in their traditional style. The land they reached was the Piratininga plains around the Tietê River, inhabited by Tupi people such as the Tupiniquim, Guaianás, and Guarani. The most notable cacique was Tibiriçá, known for his support of the Portuguese and other European colonists. The priests wanted to convert the Indians of the Plateau of Piratininga to Christianity, on a site separated from the coast by the Serra do Mar, which the Indians called Serra Paranapiacaba. Indigenous names still mark the map today, among them Tietê, Ipiranga, Tamanduateí, Anhangabaú, Itaquaquecetuba, and Cotia. During the visit of Mem de Sá, Governor-General of Brazil, the population of the Village of São Bernardo do Campo was ordered moved to the vicinity of the college, on a steep hill beside the wetland known as the Várzea do Carmo. The new location offered better protection from attacks, and the settlement was renamed Vila de São Paulo, belonging to the Captaincy of São Vicente.

• 3. Flag-Bearers And Gold

  ›

  In the 17th century, São Paulo was one of the poorest regions of the Portuguese colony. Because they were extremely poor, the Paulistas could not afford to buy African slaves as other colonists did. The town instead became a center for the bandeirantes, intrepid invaders who marched into unknown lands in search of gold, diamonds, precious stones, and Indians to enslave. The word bandeirantes can be translated as "flag-bearers" or "flag-followers," and their excursions had the primary purpose of profit and the expansion of territory for the Portuguese crown. Conflict with the Jesuits ran deep. The Jesuits opposed the domestic slave trade in Indians, and in 1640 the bandeirantes forced their expulsion from the city. The discovery of gold in the region of Minas Gerais, in the 1690s, brought new settlers and attention to São Paulo. On the 11th of July 1711, the town was elevated to city status. Around the 1720s, gold was found by the pioneers near what are now Cuiabá and Goiânia, and the Portuguese pushed their territory beyond the Tordesillas Line to take in the gold regions. When the gold ran out in the late 18th century, São Paulo shifted to growing sugar cane, exported through the Port of Santos along the first modern highway to the coast, the Calçada do Lorena. The estate of the Governor of the State of São Paulo carries their name today: the Palácio dos Bandeirantes, in the neighborhood of Morumbi.

• 4. The Coffee Engine

  ›

  After Brazil became independent from Portugal in 1822, Emperor Pedro I named São Paulo an Imperial City. In 1827, a law school was founded at the Convent of São Francisco, today part of the University of São Paulo, and the influx of students and teachers gave new impetus to growth. Coffee became the region's chief export crop, cultivated first in the Paraíba Valley and later in Campinas, Rio Claro, São Carlos, and Ribeirão Preto. From 1869 onward, the city was linked to the port of Santos by the Estrada de Ferro Santos-Jundiaí, nicknamed The Lady, and soon all railroads from the interior converged on the state capital. In 1888, the Golden Law, the Lei Áurea, was sanctioned by Isabel, Princess Imperial of Brazil, abolishing slavery in Brazil. Enslaved people had been the main source of labor in the coffee plantations until then. After abolition, and with governmental stimulus toward immigration, the province began receiving large numbers of Italian, Japanese, and Portuguese peasants, many of whom settled in the capital. When Brazil became a republic on the 15th of November 1889, São Paulo took turns with Minas Gerais in electing presidents, an alliance known as "coffee and milk," since Minas Gerais was famous for its dairy. The city reached its first million inhabitants in 1928, and the height of the coffee period is marked by the second Luz Station and by Paulista Avenue, opened in 1900 and lined with mansions.

• 5. Smoke And Modernism

  ›

  Factories began to arise by the hands of industrious families, including many immigrants of Italian and Jewish origin, and São Paulo became known for its smoky, foggy air. The Modern Art Week of 1922, held at the Theatro Municipal, brought avant-garde ideas and works of art to the city. Its figures included poets Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade, artists Anita Malfatti, Tarsila do Amaral, and Lasar Segall, and the sculptor Victor Brecheret. In 1929, São Paulo won its first skyscraper, the Martinelli Building. Conflict also scarred the streets. In 1924, the São Paulo Revolt raged for 23 days, from 5 to the 28th of July, in working-class neighborhoods near the center, leaving hundreds dead and thousands injured. Federal troops of president Artur Bernardes fought rebels of the Brazilian Army and the Public Force of São Paulo, and the government launched an indiscriminate artillery bombardment that struck mostly civilian targets. As a result, a third of the city's 700,000 inhabitants fled, in what has been described as the largest urban conflict in the history of Brazil. In 1932, the entire population engaged in the Constitutionalist Revolution against the Provisional Government of Getúlio Vargas. Two years later, in 1934, the University of São Paulo was founded by reuniting faculties created in the 19th century.

• 6. City That Never Stops

  ›

  In the 1950s, São Paulo was known as "the city that never stops" and "the fastest growing city in the world." In 1947, it gained its first paved highway, the Via Anchieta, built on the old route of José de Anchieta and connecting the capital to the coast. The city held a large celebration in 1954 for the Fourth Centenary of its founding, when Ibirapuera Park was inaugurated and the source of the Tietê River was discovered in Salesópolis. Two builders shaped this era: mayor Francisco Prestes Maia, who in the 1930s designed the Avenue Plan that revolutionized São Paulo's traffic, and governor Ademar de Barros, also mayor between 1957 and 1961. The two are credited with the rectification of the Tietê river and the São Paulo Metro. On the 13th of February 1963, Ademar de Barros and Prestes Maia created study commissions to prepare the basic project for the Metro and allocated its first funds. Construction began in 1968 under Mayor José Vicente de Faria Lima, and commercial operation started on the 14th of September 1974. By 2016, the network ran 71.5 km across 64 stations on five lines, carrying 1.1 billion passengers that year. At the start of the 1960s the city already had four million inhabitants, and by 1960 it had surpassed Rio de Janeiro to become Brazil's most populous city.

• 7. A Melting Pot

  ›

  From 1870 to 2010, roughly 2.3 million immigrants arrived in the state from all parts of the world, and São Paulo is considered the most multicultural city in Brazil. Of its 12 million inhabitants, half have full or partial Italian ancestry, giving the city more descendants of Italians than any Italian city, including Rome, which has 2.8 million inhabitants. Italians still gather in neighborhoods like Bixiga, Brás, and Mooca, and their accent entered the local speech through the samba singer Adoniran Barbosa, born to Italian parents. The metropolitan figures span the world: 6 million people of Portuguese descent, 5 million Italian, 1.7 million African, 1 million Arab, 665,000 Japanese, and tens of thousands of German, French, Greek, Chinese, Korean, Bolivian, and Jewish descent. São Paulo is home to the largest Japanese community outside Japan. In 1958 the census counted 120,000 Japanese in the city, and by 1987 there were 326,000, with another 170,000 in the surrounding areas of the state. The Jewish colony of more than 80,000 concentrates mainly in Higienópolis and Bom Retiro. People also came from within Brazil. Migration from the northeast grew enormously in the 1930s, and in the area of Sé and Brás those migrants composed 41% of the population. Six thousand pizzerias now produce about a million pizzas a day.

• 8. The Largest Economy

  ›

  São Paulo is the only Brazilian city to surpass the 1 trillion reais mark in GDP, and it represents around 10% of the Brazilian total and just over a third of São Paulo state's. It is the headquarters of B3, the largest stock exchange in Latin America by market capitalization, with financial districts clustered around Paulista, Faria Lima, and Berrini avenues. Of all international companies doing business in Brazil, 63% have their head offices here, and the city is the source of around one third of Brazilian scientific production. Its main university, the University of São Paulo, is often considered the best in Brazil and Latin America. The streets carry the city's wealth on display. The Jardins district, with luxury brands along Oscar Freire, Lorena, and Haddock Lobo, draws comparison to Rodeo Drive, and the Iguatemi Faria Lima, opened in 1966, is Brazil's oldest mall. Culture matches commerce. Since 1997, São Paulo has hosted the annual Gay Pride Parade, considered the biggest in the world by the Guinness Book of World Records, with over 5 million participants, typically rivaling the New York City Pride March. The parade begins at the São Paulo Museum of Art, crosses Paulista Avenue, and follows Consolação Street to Praça Roosevelt. Same-sex marriage in São Paulo was legalized on the 18th of December 2012, a date the city carries forward as it keeps leading rather than being led.