Citycentre

Brazil (São Paulo State)

São Paulo City

In 1554, the Jesuit priests José de Anchieta and Manuel da Nóbrega established a mission station on the banks of the Rio Tietê in an attempt to bring Christianity to the Tupi-Guarani Indians. Called São Paulo dos Campos de Piratininga, it was 70km inland and 730m up, in the sheer, forest-covered inclines of the Serra do Mar, above the port of São Vicente. The gently undulating plateau and the proximity to the Paraná and Plata rivers facilitated traffic into the interior and, with São Paulo as their base, roaming gangs of bandeirantes set out in search of loot. Around the mission school, a few adobe huts were erected and the settlement soon developed into a trading post and a base from which to secure mineral wealth. In 1681, São Paulo – as the town became known – became a seat of regional government and, in 1711, it was made a municipality by the king of Portugal, the cool, healthy climate helping to attract settlers from the coast.

With the expansion of coffee plantations westwards from Rio de Janeiro, along the Paraibá Valley, in the mid-nineteenth century, São Paulo’s fortunes looked up. The region’s rich soil – terra roxa – was ideally suited to coffee cultivation, and from about 1870 plantation owners took up residence in the city, which was undergoing a rapid transformation into a bustling regional centre. British, French and German merchants and hoteliers opened local operations, British-owned rail lines radiated in all directions from São Paulo, and foreign water, gas, telephone and electricity companies moved in to service the city. In the 1890s, enterprising “coffee barons” began to place some of their profits into local industry, hedging their bets against a possible fall in the price of coffee, with textile factories being a favourite area for investment. As the local population could not meet the ever-increasing demands of plantation owners, factories looked to immigrants to meet their labour requirements. As a result, São Paulo’s population soared, almost tripling to 69,000 by 1890 and, by the end of the next decade, increasing to 239,000. By 1950 it had reached 2.2 million and São Paulo had clearly established its dominant role in Brazil’s urbanization: today the city’s population stands at around ten million, rising to at least sixteen million when the sprawling metropolitan area is included. As industry, trade and population developed at such a terrific pace, buildings were erected with little time to consider their aesthetics; in any case, they often became cramped as soon as they were built, or had to be demolished to make way for a new avenue. However, some grand public buildings were built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and a few still remain, though none is as splendid as those found in Buenos Aires, a city that developed at much the same time. Even now, conservation is seen as not being profitable, and São Paulo is more concerned with rising population, rising production and rising consumption – factors that today are paralleled by rising levels of homelessness, pollution and violence. Residents of the city, Paulistanos, talk smugly of their work ethic, supposedly superior to that which dominates the rest of Brazil, and speak contemptuously of the idleness of cariocas (in reply, cariocas joke sourly that Paulistanos are simply incapable of enjoying anything, sex in particular). But work and profit aside, São Paulo does have its attractions: the city lays claim to have long surpassed Rio as Brazil’s cultural centre, and is home to a lively music and arts world. The city’s food, too, is often excellent, thanks to immigrants from so many parts of the world. The City
For visitors and locals alike, the fact that São Paulo’s history extends back for over four centuries, well beyond the late nineteenth-century coffee boom, usually goes completely unnoticed. Catapulted virtually overnight from being a sleepy, provincial market town into one of the western hemisphere’s great cities, there are few places in the world that have as comprehensively turned their backs on the past as São Paulo has done. In the nineteenth century, most of colonial São Paulo was levelled and replaced by a disorganized patchwork of wide avenues and large buildings, the process repeating itself ever since; today, not only has the city’s colonial architectual heritage all but vanished, but there’s little physical evidence of the coffee boom decades either. Nevertheless, a few relics have, somehow, escaped demolition and offer hints of São Paulo’s bygone eras. What remains is hidden away discreetly in corners, scattered throughout the city, often difficult to find but all the more thrilling when you do. There is no shortage of museums, but with a few significant exceptions they are disappointing for a city of São Paulo’s stature. Collections have frequently been allowed to deteriorate and exhibits are generally poorly displayed. Fortunately, museum charges are negligible, around $1, and are only given in the text below where they are above this figure. There are several sights associated with the vast influx of immigrants to the city, and it’s worth visiting some of the individual bairros, detailed in the text, where the immigrants and their descendants have established communities: the food, as you’d expect, is just one reason to do this. Along Avenida Paulista
By 1900, the coffee barons had moved on, flaunting their wealth from their new mansions, set in spacious gardens stretching along the three-kilometre-long Avenida Paulista – then a tree-lined avenue set along a ridge 3km southwest of the city centre. In the late 1960s, and throughout the 1970s, Avenida Paulista resembled a giant building site, with banks and other companies competing to build ever-taller buildings. There was little time for creativity, and along the entire length of the avenue it would be difficult to single out more than one example of decent modern architecture. There are, however, about a dozen Art Nouveau or Art Deco mansions along Avenida Paulista, afforded official protection from the developers’ bulldozers. Some lie empty, the subjects of legal wrangles over inheritance rights, while others have been turned into branches of McDonalds or prestigious headquarters for banks. One mansion that is well worth visiting is the French-style Casa das Rosas, Av. Paulista 35 (Tues–Sun noon–8pm), near Brigadeiro mêtro station at the easterly end of the avenida. Set in a rose garden with a beautiful Art Nouveau stained-glass window, it contrasts stunningly with the mirrored-glass and steel office building behind it. The Casa das Rosas is now a cultural centre owned by the state of São Paulo, where interesting art exhibitions are often held. One of the few interesting modern buildings along Avenida Paulista is that of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo at no. 1578 (Tues–Sun 11am–6pm, Thurs until 8pm; $5, free on Thurs). Designed by Lina Bo Bardi and opened in 1968, the huge concrete structure appears to float above the ground, supported only by remarkably delicate pillars. MASP is the great pride of São Paulo’s art lovers, and is considered to have the most important collection of Western art in Latin America, featuring the work of great European artists from the last five hundred years. For most North American and European visitors, notable though some of the individual works of Hieronymus Bosch, Rembrandt and Degas may be, the highlights of the collection are likely to be the seventeenth- to nineteenth-century landscapes of Brazil by European artists, none more important than those of Frans Post. MASP is one of Brazil’s few museums that regularly receives international visiting exhibitions; and the museum’s excellent and very reasonably priced restaurant (Mon–Fri 11.30am–3pm, Sat, Sun & holidays noon–4pm) is an excellent escape from the crowds, exhaust fumes and heat of Avenida Paulista outside. Almost directly across Avenida Paulista from MASP is one of São Paulo’s smallest but most delightful parks, the Parque Siqueira Campos, created in 1912 when building in the area began. It was planned by the French landscape artist Paul Villan, based around local vegetation with some introduced trees and bushes, and in 1968 underwent thorough renovation, directed by the great designer, Roberto Burle Marx. The park consists of 45,000 square metres of almost pure Atlantic forest with a wealth of different trees, and there’s a network of trails, as well as shaded benches to sit and relax on away from the intense summer heat. The park is well patrolled by wardens but a degree of alertness is still called for – don’t doze off. Jardins
Avenida Paulista marks the southwestern boundary of downtown São Paulo, and beyond that are the Jardins, laid out in 1915 and styled after the British idea of the garden suburb. These exclusive residential neighbourhoods have long since taken over from the city centre as the location of most of the city’s best restaurants and shopping streets, and many residents never stray from their luxurious ghettos – protected from Third World realities by high walls, complex alarm systems, guards and fierce dogs. At the northeastern edge of the Jardins suburb and falling mostly within it, the district of Cerqueira César straddles both sides of Avenida Paulista and is dominated by a mixed bag of hotels, offices and apartment buildings interspersed with shops and restaurants geared towards the city’s upper middle class. Praça da República and around
Praça da República is now largely an area of offices, hotels and shops but was once the site of the lavish mansions of the coffee-plantation owners who began to take up residence in the city from about 1870. However, no sooner had the mansions been built – constructed from British iron, Italian marble, Latvian pine, Portuguese tiles and Belgian stained glass – than they were abandoned as the city centre took on a brash and commercial character, and the coffee barons moved to new homes in the Higienópolis district, a short distance west of Praça da República. The central mansions were all knocked down, though a few remain in Higienópolis: the Art Nouveau-influenced Vila Penteado, on Rua Maranhão, one of the last to be built in the area, is a fine example. Southeast of the Praça da República, lies the Triângulo, the traditional banking district and a zone of concentrated vertical growth. At the northern edge of the Triângulo, on Avenida São João, stands the thirty-storey Edifício Martinelli, the city’s first skyscraper. Modelled on the Empire State Building, Martinelli was inaugurated in 1929 and remains an important landmark, only dwarfed by Latin America’s tallest office building, the 42-storey Edifício Itália, built in 1965 on Avenida São Luís, the street leading south from the praça. On cloud- and smog-free days, the Itália’s 41st-floor restaurant, the Terraço Itália, is a good vantage point from which to view the city; the food’s expensive and not very good, so you’re best off just having afternoon tea or an early evening drink at the bar. In the 1940s and 1950s, Avenida São Luís itself was São Paulo’s version of Fifth Avenue, lined with high-class apartment buildings and offices, and, though no longer fashionable, it still retains a certain degree of elegance. Admirers of the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer will immediately pick out the serpentine Edifício Copan, the largest of the apartment and office buildings on the avenue. Northwest of Praça da República along the Avenida São João is the strikingly ugly Memorial da América Latina (Tues–Sun 9am–6pm; tel 011/3823-9611), located close to the Barra Funda metrô station. Designed by Oscar Niemeyer in 1989, this is a building that even the most avid fans of the architect find it hard to say anything good about, looking more like a nuclear weapons site than a showcase for Latin American culture. Unfortunately, although the Memorial has the potential for being one of the city’s most important cultural venues, it is currently under-used: apart from a permanent display of Latin American folkloric art, the Memorial hosts occasional exhibitions, temporary art shows, concerts and conferences on cultural themes. Praça da Sé
Praça da Sé is the most convenient starting point for the very brief hunt for colonial São Paulo. The square itself is a large expanse of concrete and fountains, dominated by the Catedral Metropolitana, a huge neo-Gothic structure with a capacity of 8000 but otherwise unremarkable. Completed in 1954, it replaced São Paulo’s eighteenth-century cathedral, which was demolished in 1920. During the day the square outside bustles with activity, always crowded with hawkers and people heading towards the commercial district on its western fringes. At night it’s transformed into a campsite for homeless children, who survive as best they can by shining shoes, selling chewing gum or begging. Along Rua Boa Vista, on the opposite side of the square from the cathedral, is where the city of São Paulo originated. The whitewashed Portuguese Baroque Pátio do Colégio is a replica of the college and chapel that formed the centre of the Jesuit mission founded here in 1554. Although built in 1896 (the other buildings forming the Pátio were constructed in the twentieth century), the chapel (Mon–Fri 8am–5pm) is an accurate reproduction, but it’s in the Casa de Anchieta (Tues–Sun 9am–noon & 1–5pm), part of the Pátio, that the most interesting sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century relics – mostly old documents – are held. Virtually around the corner from the Pátio do Colégio at Rua Roberto Simonsen 136 is the Museu da Cidade (Tues–Sun 9am–5pm). More interesting than the museum’s small collection chronicling the development of São Paulo is the building that it’s housed in, the Solar da Marquesa de Santos, an eighteenth-century manor house that represents the sole remaining residential building in the city from this period. A couple of hundred metres from here, at Av. Rangel Pestana 230, is the well-preserved Igreja do Carmo (Mon–Fri 7–11am & 1–5pm, Sat & Sun 7–11am), which was built in 1632 and still retains many of its seventeenth-century features, including a fine Baroque high altar. In these streets, particularly around Rua 25 de Março, São Paulo’s Lebanese and Syrian community is concentrated. At Rua Comandante Abdo Schahin 40, the Empório Syrio sells Middle Eastern delicacies, and on the same road there are some excellent Arab restaurants, always full with local merchants. The community is fairly evenly divided between Muslims and Christians, and hidden away at Rua Cavalheiro Basilio Jafet 15 there’s a beautiful Orthodox church. Over the other side of the Praça da Sé, a two-minute walk down Rua Senado Feijó to the Largo de São Francisco is the Igreja de São Francisco (Mon–Fri 7.30am–5.30pm), a typical mid-seventeenth-century Portuguese colonial church which features intricately carved ornaments and an elaborate Baroque altar. While here, step inside the courtyard of the Faculdade de Direito de São Paulo – one of Brazil’s first higher education institutions, founded in 1824 – which adjoins the church and take a look at the huge 1930s stained-glass window depicting the Largo de São Francisco in the early nineteenth century. Before leaving this area, at Praça do Patriarca, by the Viaduto do Chá (the pedestrian bridge linking the two parts of the commercial centre), the Igreja de Santo Antônio is worth a visit. Built in 1717, its yellow and white facade has been beautifully restored; the interior has been stripped of most of its eighteenth-century accoutrements, though its simple painted wooden ceiling deserves a glance. North of Praça da Sé
The coffee boom that led to the dismantling of São Paulo’s colonial buildings provided little in terms of lasting replacements. In the city’s first industrial suburbs, towering brick chimneys are still to be seen, but generally the areas are now dominated by small workshops and low-income housing, and even in the city centre there are very few buildings of note, most of the area given over to unremarkable shops and offices. To the north of Praça da Sé, at Rua da Cantareira 306, you’ll find the Mercado Municipal, an imposing, vaguely German neo-Gothic hall, completed in 1933. Apart from the phenomenal display of Brazilian and imported fruit, vegetables, cheese and other produce, the market (Mon–Sat 5am–4pm) is most noted for its enormous stained-glass windows depicting scenes of cattle raising, market gardening and coffee and banana plantations. Just across the Viaduto do Chá, in the direction of Praça da República, is the Teatro Municipal, São Paulo’s most distinguished public building, an eclectic mixture of Art Nouveau and Italian Renaissance styles. Work began on the building in 1903, when the coffee boom was at its peak and São Paulo at its most confident. The theatre is still the city’s main venue for classical music, and the auditorium, lavishly decorated and furnished with Italian marble, velvet, gold leaf and mirrors, can be viewed only if you’re attending a performance. If you need a break from pavement bashing, a good place to escape to is Shopping Light, across from the theatre. This is São Paulo’s newest shopping centre and one of its most upmarket; housed within are fashion and interior design boutiques, as well as various cafés and restaurants. Luz
Further north, the once affluent and still leafy bairro of Luz is home to São Paulo’s two main train stations, around which one of the city’s seediest red-light districts has sprung up – normal care should be taken in the area, especially alone and at night. In recent years, Luz has been undergoing a remarkable renaissance, with massive city and state government investment aimed at transforming the bairro into a top-rank cultural centre. At the intersection of Rua Duque de Caxias and Rua Mauá is the Estação Júlio Prestes, built between 1926 and 1937 and drawing on late nineteenth-century French and Italian architectural forms. The building’s most beautiful features are its large stained-glass windows, which depict the role of the train in the expansion of the Brazilian economy in the early twentieth century. Although part of the building still serves as a train station for suburban services, its Great Hall was transformed in the late 1990s into the Sala São Paulo, a 1500-seat concert hall – home of the world-class Orquestra Sinfônica de Estado de São Paulo, and centrepiece of the Complexo Cultural Júlio Prestes (tel 011/223-5199). Nearby, along Rua Mauá at Largo General Osório 66, there are signs of further changes to the area, with the transformation of the Edifício DOPS, a large, anonymous-looking building. During the military rule of the 1960s to 1980s, this was the headquarters of the infamous Departamento de Ordem Política e Social, and was used as one of the two main torture centres in São Paulo. The precise future use of the building remains uncertain, but temporary alternative art exhibitions are currently held there. One idea is to convert the building for use as a music school, but there are also calls to commemorate the building’s ugly past in some other way. Further along Rua Mauá, towards Avenida Tiradentes, is the Estação da Luz, part of the British-owned rail network that did much to stimulate São Paulo’s explosive growth in the late nineteenth century. Built in 1901 on the site that had been occupied since 1864 by a much smaller terminal, everything was imported from Britain for its construction, from the design of the project to the smallest of screws. Although the refined decoration of its chambers was destroyed by fire in 1946, interior details – iron balconies, passageways and grilles – bear witness to the majestic structure’s original elegance. The Parque da Luz (daily 10am–6pm) is one block north on Avenida Tiradentes. Dating back to 1800, the park was São Paulo’s first public garden, and its intricate wrought-iron fencing, Victorian bandstands, ponds and rich foliage provide evidence of its former glory. Until very recently, the park was considered off limits, but security is now excellent and, as one of the very few centrally located patches of greenery in the city, it is now popular with local residents and visitors alike. Renovations to the space continue, and it is also being developed as a sculpture park. Adjoining the park, at Avenida Tiradentes 141, is the Pinacoteca do Estado (Tues–Fri 11am–6pm, Sat & Sun 1–6pm; $3), the state of São Paulo gallery. One of the most pleasant and professionally maintained galleries in Brazil, it contains an extensive collection of beautifully displayed nineteenth- and twentieth-century Brazilian art, including works by Larsar Segall, Di Cavalcanti, Cândido Portinari, Tarsilla do Amaral and Almeida Junior. A short walk north of the Pinacoteca, by the Tiradentes metrô station at Av. Tiradentes 676, is one of the city’s few surviving colonial churches, the Igreja do Convento da Luz (daily 6.30–11am & 2–5pm), a rambling structure of uncharacteristic grandeur. Built on the site of a sixteenth-century chapel, the former Franciscan monastery and church date back to 1774, though they’ve been much altered over the years and today house the Museu de Arte Sacra (Mon–Fri 11am–6pm, Sat & Sun 10am–7pm). The museum’s collection includes examples of Brazilian seventeenth- and eighteenth-century wooden and terracotta religious art and liturgical pieces. To the north, the adjoining bairro of Bom Retiro, formerly a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood, is now home to the city’s Korean population, with numerous shops selling cheap clothes and fabric Bixiga
Since the early twentieth century, the Italian immigrant population of the bairro of Bixiga, lying to the southwest of Praça da Sé, has given it the name “Little Italy” (it’s also known as Bela Vista). Calabrian stonemasons built their own homes with leftover materials from the building sites where they were employed, and the narrow streets are still lined with such houses. In an otherwise ordinary house at Rua dos Ingleses 118, the Museu Memória do Bixiga (Wed–Sun 2–5.30pm) enthusiastically documents the history of the bairro, and has a small collection of photographs and household items. You’ll find Italian restaurants throughout the city, but the area of greatest concentration (if not the greatest quality) is Bixiga. The central Rua 13 de Maio, and the streets running off it, are lined with cantinas, pizzerias and bars, and at night this normally quiet neighbourhood springs to life, though it’s become increasingly run-down in recent years. Liberdade
Just east of Bixiga is the bairro of Liberdade, traditional home of the city’s large Japanese community. Rua Galvão Bueno and intersecting streets are largely devoted to Japanese restaurants and shops selling semiprecious stones, Japanese food and clothes. The Museu da Imigração Japonesa, Rua São Joaquim 381 (7th and 8th floors; Wed–Sun 1.30–5.30pm), has a Japanese-style rooftop garden and excellent displays on the contribution of the Japanese community to Brazil since their arrival in 1908 to work on the coffee plantations. In recent years, Liberdade’s ethnic character has been changing and, although the area is still Japanese-dominated, an increasing number of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese immigrants are settling in the area and introducing new businesses – most noticeably restaurants and food shops. Butantã and Morumbi
In the southwest of the city, the two bairros of Butantã and Morumbi are worth the trek. No houses from the colonial era remain standing in the city centre, but out here in the suburbs a few simple, whitewashed adobe homesteads from the time of the bandeirantes have been preserved. The easiest to visit is the Casa do Bandeirante, by the university at Praça Monteiro Lobato, Butantã (Tues–Fri 10.30am–5pm, Sat & Sun 9am–5pm): it’s no more than a small, typical Paulista dwelling containing eighteenth-century farm implements. One of the city’s more popular attractions is also situated in the bairro of Butantã. Founded in 1901, the Instituto Butantã, Av. Vital Brasil 1500 (Tues–Sun 9am–4.30pm), was one of the world’s foremost research centres for the study of venomous snakes and insects and the development of anti-venom serums. Sadly, financial cuts have had a devastating effect on the institute, and what was once one of the highlights of a tour of São Paulo is now, despite its enduring reputation, a large disappointment. There’s a dark and dusty museum that documents the history of the institute’s work, huge, mostly empty, snake pits, and rooms where spiders and scorpions are bred; the work of the institute, however, now goes on almost entirely behind closed doors. Fundação Maria Luiza e Oscar Americano
Situated in the elegant suburb of Morumbi, the Fundação Maria Luiza e Oscar Americano, Av. Morumbi 3700 (Tues–Fri 11am–5pm, Sat & Sun 10am–5pm; $5; tel 011/842-0077), is a sprawling modernist house full of eighteenth-century furniture, religious sculptures and collections of silver, china, coins and tapestry. Amongst the most valuable works are Brazilian landscapes by the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Frans Post, and drawings and important paintings by Cândido Portinari and Emiliano di Cavalcanti. The house is set on a hilltop, and the beautiful park-like gardens make this an excellent place to escape the city. There’s a superb tearoom, serving high teas (expensive at $10 per person) until 6pm daily, and on Sundays at 4pm there are concerts. Courses on music, art and architecture are held during the week.