São Paulo

São Paulo is a city on a high plateau in southeastern Brazil and the capital of the state that shares its name. It carries the name of the apostle Paul, because its founders held their first mass there on the feast of his conversion. Paulistanos also call it the Land of Drizzle, terra da garoa, after the fine mist that often hangs over the plateau.

Manuel da Nóbrega and José de Anchieta, two Jesuit priests, opened a mission school on the Piratininga plateau in 1554 to teach the Tupi people. From the 17th century, expeditions known as bandeiras left the small town and carried Portuguese claims deep into the interior of the continent. Prince Pedro proclaimed the independence of Brazil beside the Ipiranga stream, then on the edge of town, in 1822. Coffee from the plateau reached the port of Santos by railway from the 1860s, and the money it brought drew settlers from Italy, Portugal, Spain and later Japan. The Modern Art Week of the 1920s, held at the Theatro Municipal, opened the modernist movement in Brazilian painting and literature.

Ambev, the brewer of Brahma and Antarctica beer, has its headquarters in the city, and so does Votorantim, a family group known for its cement and aluminum. Natura began as a small cosmetics shop in São Paulo and now sells its creams and perfumes across Latin America through a network of door-to-door consultants.

Avenida Paulista opened in the 1890s along the crest of the plateau, first as a street of mansions built by coffee growers. The São Paulo Museum of Art, known as MASP, shows its paintings in a red-framed glass box designed by Lina Bo Bardi and lifted above an open plaza. Ibirapuera Park was laid out for the fourth centenary of the city in the 1950s, with pavilions and a domed auditorium by Oscar Niemeyer. The University of São Paulo was formed in the 1930s by joining older schools of law, medicine and engineering, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso taught sociology there before he became president of Brazil.