Rio is a beauty. But Sao Paulo -
Sao Paulo is a city.
- Marlene Dietrich
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 Sao
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
Sao Vicente. The gently undulating
plateau and the proximity to the
Paraná and Plata rivers facilitated
traffic into the interior and, with
Sao 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, Sao 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, Sao
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 Sao 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, Sao
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 Sao
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 Sao 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, Sao 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.
