Sao Paulo, Brazil
São Paulo, city, capital of São Paulo estado (state), southeastern Brazil. It is the foremost industrial centre in Latin America. The city is located on a plateau of the Brazilian Highlands extending inland from the Serra do Mar, which rises as part of the Great Escarpment only a short distance inland from the Atlantic Ocean. The city itself sits in a shallow basin with low mountains to the west. It lies about 220 miles (350 km) southwest of Rio de Janeiro and about 30 miles (50 km) inland from its Atlantic Ocean port of Santos. The city’s name derives from its having been founded by Jesuit missionaries on January 25, 1554, the anniversary of the conversion of St. Paul.
With one of the world’s fastest-growing metropolitan populations, São Paulo is also the largest city of the Southern Hemisphere and one of the largest conurbations in the world. It is a dynamic late bloomer, having been heavily overshadowed by Rio de Janeiro not only during the colonial era but also throughout the 19th century. Only when coffee became Brazil’s vital export crop in the last decades of the 19th century did São Paulo become a major centre of economic activity with concomitant population growth. Migration, both from Europe and internal, led to great expansion and diversification. When São Paulo served as the main focus of Brazil’s industrialization in the early decades of the 20th century, it rapidly closed the gap with Rio de Janeiro, which shortly before the turn of the century had been 10 times as large.
By the 1940s and ’50s, São Paulo was aptly referred to as the locomotive “pulling the rest of Brazil” and has since become the hub of an immense megametropolis. Its vibrant and energetic urban core is characterized by an ever-growing maze of modern steel, concrete, and glass skyscrapers in newer hubs within São Paulo’s business centre, as well as in emergent outlying business districts. The great diversity of these modern buildings—many of which are truly striking—reflects a wide variety of architectural styles and materials. Glass towers of different hues mingle with impressive granite and marble-faced structures next to metal-sheathed ones. The city’s creatively eclectic appearance, comparable to that of any of the world’s great metropolitan centres, exemplifies the advanced state of Brazilian architecture. In stark contrast to Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and most other major Brazilian cities, late-blooming São Paulo has few historical buildings and virtually no structures dating back to the colonial era. Indeed, any building erected before 1900 is deemed historical in São Paulo. Exceptions to the lack of antiquity in the midst of 20th- and 21st-century construction are the church and convent of Luz (1579), now housing the Museum of Sacred Art; the Carmo Church (1632); and the São Francisco Church (1676, rebuilt in 1791).
By the end of the 20th century, the city of São Paulo proper had a population of more than 10 million, and the metropolitan region had soared to about 19 million inhabitants. Area city, 576 square miles (1,493 square km); Greater São Paulo, 3,070 square miles (7,951 square km). Pop. (2000) 9,813,187; Greater São Paulo, 17,878,703l; (2010) 11,152,344; Greater São Paulo, 19,683,975.
Character of the city
São Paulo is notable for its immensity, dynamism, and drive. Sampa, as it is called by its inhabitants, combines the best and worst of modern oversized urban conglomerates. Traditionally, it has been first and foremost a place to work, secondly a place to live, and lastly a city to enjoy. Even with its educational advantages and cultural facilities, São Paulo long upheld its end of the Brazilian aphorism “Earn in São Paulo so you can spend in Rio.” As the 21st century has unfolded, however, São Paulo’s social scene has been dramatically energized. Trendy restaurants and hip clubs have proliferated in the revitalized city centre. Beyond the new youth-oriented emphasis on food and fun, massive murals by accomplished street artists festoon buildings that were denuded of outdoor advertising by city legislation in 2006.
São Paulo’s vastness is unquestionably impressive at first glance; however, its depersonalizing scale of immensity also can prove depressing. Yet many of São Paulo’s neighbourhoods possess humanizing features and individual characteristics belying the surface appearance of a stultifying similarity. For those Paulistanos (as the city’s inhabitants are called) who are involved in São Paulo’s invigorating vitality, it is a city of which to be proud, not one to be defended against criticism based on its disheartening crime and poverty statistics, which, moreover, had undergone significant improvement by the second decade of the 21st century. Nevertheless, because São Paulo is Brazil’s richest city, its poor appear even poorer in comparison with its large middle class and its numerous affluent. It also continues to attract people from the country’s rural regions in a flow that constantly feeds the bottom of the social pyramid as life improves for those already there.
People of São Paulo
The original settlers of São Paulo were relatively poor and largely from southern Portugal. They were, however, a restless people who sought actively to improve their status in life. Among them were the bandeirantes (explorers) who formed expeditions that pushed far into the interior of South America in search of slaves and mineral wealth, extending, in the process, the frontiers of what has become present-day Brazil.
The great expansion of coffee cultivation in São Paulo state after 1880 instigated a massive immigration of Europeans—mostly Italians but also many Portuguese, Spaniards, Germans, and eastern Europeans. In the early 1900s other settlers came from Japan and the Middle East. Today more Japanese reside in São Paulo than in any other community outside Japan, and Brazilians of Japanese extraction constitute a large proportion of the highly educated professional strata. By the 1930s São Paulo’s growth was based on internal migration, primarily from northeastern Brazil and some from the interior of the state. This migration, which continued for decades, included many descendants of African slaves. By 1970, many Koreans and Bolivians had immigrated to the city. A high degree of assimilation exists among the different ethnic communities, which are dispersed across São Paulo. Many well-to-do immigrants have their own social clubs. Rural immigrants from northeastern Brazil often gather on weekends at particular squares and parks in lower-income areas of the city. As in Rio de Janeiro, the dispersal of population is largely along socioeconomic lines; social tensions are generally much more rooted in economics than in ethnicity.
In 1940 the city had a population of about 1,300,000 and its immediate suburbs slightly more than 100,000. By 1960, however, the population of São Paulo proper had tripled and that of the near suburbs was about six times larger; moreover, a second ring of suburbs had developed with a population approaching 300,000. By 1970 nearly six million people lived in the city and more than one million lived in the immediate suburbs, while the secondary ring roughly doubled and a third ring had begun expanding rapidly. Astonishing growth continued through the 1970s and ’80s, as São Paulo remained a magnet attracting a surplus population from other regions. By the 1990s the growth of the city, with a population exceeding nine million residents, began to slow, but the expansion of the outlying areas of Greater São Paulo continued apace.
As a result of these migratory inflows, nearly two-thirds of São Paulo’s population is of European descent, and slightly less than one-third are of African descent or are mulatto (mulato; person of mixed African and European ancestry).
The remainder of the population is made up of Asians, mainly Japanese, and other very small ethnic groups. Roman Catholicism is the dominant religion, and the archdiocese of São Paulo is one of the world’s largest in number of adherents; yet thriving Pentecostal Christian groups are making serious inroads. There is a significant Jewish community as well. Other religions are represented in smaller numbers, and many Paulistanos attend the rites of Afro-Brazilian, syncretic, and spiritist groups. Portuguese is the predominant language, although other languages, including English and Spanish, are spoken by the more highly educated.
Economy
São Paulo is one of the world’s largest diversified economic centres. It is an international leader in industry, from heavy to high tech; in banking and finance; in commerce; and in global trade. As the capital and core of a state with a gross domestic product (GDP) larger than that of most countries, it has an immense government services sector and looms large in communications and transportation.
History
The early period
São Paulo was the first highland settlement established in Brazil. Occupying the lower terraces of the Tietê River in the midst of tall grasses and scattered scrub trees, it began as a small Indian settlement. In 1554 Portuguese Jesuit priests Manuel da Nóbrega and José de Anchieta founded a mission and school there (the Pátio de Colégio). The community grew slowly and had only 300 inhabitants by the end of the 16th century. Yet, São Paulo became a township in 1560 and had a town council that could enact and enforce laws. In 1683 it succeeded São Vicente as seat of the captaincy, or hereditary fief, and the inhabitants already had become known as Paulistanos or Paulistas.
Seventeenth-century São Paulo was a base for expeditions (bandeiras) into the hinterlands by armed pioneers (bandeirantes) in search of Indian slaves, gold, silver, and diamonds. In the process, Portuguese explorers expanded the frontiers of what was to become present-day Brazil into areas claimed by the Spanish. In 1711 São Paulo attained the status of a city, yet it remained an agrarian town that had yet to see any significant prosperity. Large-scale gold and diamond mining brought about remarkable changes in the colony’s economy and stimulated immigration from Europe. But most of the wealth that the explorers had helped to discover escaped their grasp when Minas Gerais was granted status in 1720, and its riches passed through the more accessible and developed Rio de Janeiro.
The city after independence
The Portuguese regent Dom Pedro (later Pedro I) declared Brazil’s independence on September 7, 1822, on the plain of Ipiranga, now within São Paulo. By 1840 São Paulo was still a town of 20,000 inhabitants centred on a low hill and the neighbouring Anhangabaú valley. The Tamanduateí River was straightened in 1849 and a municipal market constructed in 1867. But not until 1875 was the colonial centre linked by a new street to what is today called Republic Square. By then brick houses were being built, and gas streetlamps and horse-drawn streetcars were coming into use.
As coffee became Brazil’s main source of export earnings, São Paulo and Santos, its port, grew at a spectacular rate, and the surrounding countryside was transformed from an isolated frontier to an agricultural heartland. Coffee provided employment for many of the immigrants who began arriving in great numbers from the 1870s. Italians, who accounted for more than 600,000 of the nearly 900,000 foreigners coming to the state between 1888 and 1900, soon came to outnumber native Brazilians. The ethnic mosaic was further enriched by Portuguese, Spaniards, Germans, and eastern Europeans, followed by Syrians, Lebanese, and Japanese. Coffee planters’ townhouses sprang up in Higienópolis and Campos Eliseos in the west, and crowded workers’ housing extended through Moóca and Brás in the east. Three-story buildings began to appear on the central Triângulo (“Triangle”), and in 1892 an iron viaduct was built across the Anhangabaú valley from Cha Hill, where tea (cha) plants had been grown only a few years earlier. The population jumped from 44,000 in 1886 to nearly 130,000 by 1893.
By 1905 new industries included textile mills, shoe factories, and others using local raw materials. Cotton textile mills alone employed 39,000 workers. Most of the new factories and warehouses were established in the neighborhoods of Brás, Bom Retiro, Moóca, Água Branca, and Ipiranga. During the period 1899–1911, Mayor Antônio Prado widened streets, completed the monumental Luz train station (of British design and materials), built new plazas (including Prado Square), and started construction of the Santa Ifigênia Viaduct, opened in 1913. His successor remodeled Sé Square, created Patriarca Square, and completed Dom Pedro II Park, begun in 1911. By that time opulent mansions of the wealthiest coffee barons lined Avenida Paulista, and concrete buildings of five to six stories were becoming common in the city centre, which was crowned by a seven-story marvel of reinforced concrete. São Paulo’s population grew from about 240,000 in 1900 to 580,000 by 1920. Whereas in the late 19th century São Paulo had only one-tenth the population of Rio de Janeiro, by 1920 it was just more than half as large.
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