Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
São Paulo
São Paulo, Brazil's most populous state and home to its biggest city, is Brazil's
economic powerhouse. As well as being responsible for nearly half the
country's industrial output, it also has an agricultural sector that produces,
among other things, more orange juice than any single nation worldwide. Its
eponymous city boasts a dizzying variety of cultural centres and art galleries,
and the noise from its vibrant fashion and music scenes is heard around the
globe. Although most people come here only to visit its capital on business,
the state also has excellent sandy beaches that rival Rio's best. Inland, the state
is dominated by fields of cattle pasture, sugar cane, orange trees and soya, but
some impressive fazenda houses still remain as legacies of the days when the
local economy was dominated by coffee. To escape scorching summer
temperatures, or for the novelty in tropical Brazil of a winter chill, you can also
head to Campos do Jordão, one of the country's highest settlements.
São Paulo state's economic pre-eminence is a relatively recent phenomenon. In 1507 São
Vicente, the second-oldest Portuguese settlement in Brazil, was founded on the coast near
present-day
Santos
, but for over three hundred years the area comprising today's São Paulo
state remained a backwater. The inhabitants were a hardy people, of mixed Portuguese and
indigenous origin, from whom, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, emerged the
bandeirantes
- frontiersmen who roamed far into the South American interior to secure
the borders of the Portuguese Empire against Spanish encroachment, capturing natives as
slaves and seeking out precious metals and gems as they went.
It wasn't until the mid-nineteenth century that São Paulo became rich. Cotton
production received a boost with the arrival in the late 1860s of Confederate refugees
from the American South, who settled around
Santa Bárbara d'Oeste
, about 140km
from the then small town of
São Paulo
itself. But after disappointing results with
cotton, most of these plantation owners switched their attention to coffee and, by the
end of the century, the state had become firmly established as the world's foremost
producer of the crop. During the same period, Brazil abolished slavery and the
plantation owners recruited European and Japanese immigrants to expand production.
Riding the wave of the coffee boom, foreign companies took the opportunity to invest
in port facilities, rail lines and power and water supplies, while textile and other new
industries emerged, too. Within a few decades, the town of São Paulo became one of
Latin America's greatest commercial and cultural centres, growing from a small town
into a vast metropolitan sprawl. Although the coffee bubble eventually burst, the state
had the resources in place to diversify into other produce and São Paulo's prominence
in Brazil's economy was assured.
8
Avoiding trouble in São Paulo
p.485
Arab São Paulo
p.491
Immigration and São Paulo
p.495
The São Paulo Bienal
p.500
Some useful bus routes
p.505
Top 5 Jewish and Arab restaurants
p.508
Top 5 East Asian restaurants
p.509
Top 5 Italian restaurants
p.511
Gay São Paulo
p.512
Carnaval in São Paulo
p.515
Confederates in São Paulo state
p.521
Fazendas around São Carlos
p.522
Santos's tourist train
p.526
Exploring Ilha Cardoso
p.536
