Curitiba

The name Curitiba is usually traced to Tupi words for a place of many pine trees or pine seeds, after the araucaria forests of the plateau. The Portuguese founded a settlement here on 29 March 1693, on what is now Tiradentes Square, as Vila da Nossa Senhora da Luz dos Pinhais; the name Curitiba was adopted in 1721. The early town lived on mining and subsistence farming, then on the cattle trail: drovers taking herds from Rio Grande do Sul to São Paulo made it an important trading post. When Paraná became a separate province in 1853, Curitiba was made its capital.

From the 1850s waves of European immigrants arrived — Germans, many of them Volga Germans, then Poles from 1871, Italians from 1878 and Ukrainians in the 1890s — followed by Japanese settlers in the 20th century. The railway down the Serra do Mar to the port of Paranaguá opened in 1885, and around 1900 the city grew rich on yerba mate; the mate barons' mansions still stand in Batel and Alto da Glória. Logging, coffee and later soya and wheat farming in the interior fed further growth.

By 1960 the city had 430,000 people and an outdated master plan. A group of young architects and planners led by Jaime Lerner proposed a new one with an affordable public transport system, a protected historic district and limits on sprawl. As mayor from the early 1970s, Lerner pedestrianised the main street, created parks to absorb floods and launched one of the world's first bus rapid transit systems in 1974. The model drew international attention, and the city grew past a million people while keeping its reputation for order and green space.

Immigration shapes Curitiba's identity. The city has the largest Polish community in Brazil, commemorated in the log houses of the Bosque do Papa, which Pope John Paul II blessed on his visit in 1980; Ukrainians, Italians, Germans and one of the largest Japanese communities in the country have their own memorials, churches and festivals, and there are Arab and Jewish communities, the Jewish one dating from the 1870s. The parks named after these groups are part of daily life, used for walks, runs and family outings at weekends.

The city has a strong cultural scene for its size. The Teatro Guaíra, with three auditoriums, is home to the Paraná Symphony Orchestra and a state ballet company, and the Curitiba Theatre Festival, held since 1992, is one of the most important in Brazil. The Paulo Leminski cultural space beside the Wire Opera House hosts large productions, and the Oscar Niemeyer Museum gives the visual arts a large stage.

Football is followed passionately. Athletico Paranaense and Coritiba, both former Brazilian champions, contest one of the country's fiercest derbies, and Paraná Clube completes the city's trio; the old Vila Capanema stadium hosted games in the 1950 World Cup, and the city was a host again in 2014. Curitibanos are proud of their planned city, its parks and its cold winters, and of being a little different from the rest of Brazil.

About 1.77 million people lived in Curitiba at the 2022 census, the capital and largest city of Paraná, and the metropolitan area of 29 municipalities has more than 3.5 million. Around half the city's residents were born elsewhere, many of them migrants from the interior of Paraná and other states.

The economy rests on industry and services. The Cidade Industrial de Curitiba, the city's industrial district, and neighbouring towns host car plants and other multinationals, making the region one of Brazil's largest vehicle producers, and the city is a centre for technology and business services. Unemployment is among the lowest of Brazil's big cities, and the Federal University of Paraná, founded in 1912, is one of several large universities.

Most people commute by bus, car or app rides, and the Ruas da Cidadania — municipal service centres beside the main bus terminals — bring public offices into the neighbourhoods. Weekends centre on the parks, the Sunday fair and family lunches. The pressures are familiar: crowded buses at rush hour, outer suburbs left off the integrated fare, and flooding when heavy rain falls on the flat river basins.

Curitiba eats like a crossroads of immigrant kitchens. Santa Felicidade is a stronghold of Italian restaurants and wineries, and Polish and German immigrants also left their mark on the city's cooking.

From the coast comes barreado, a typical dish of Paraná: beef cooked for many hours in a sealed clay pot, then eaten with cassava flour and banana. Morretes, below the Serra do Mar, is famous for it, and the tourist train down the mountains makes a day of eating it there. Pinhão, the seed of the araucaria pine that gave Curitiba its name, is another of the city's notable foods.

Churrasco is everyday southern food, and buffet lunches priced by weight fill the centre at midday. The Mercado Municipal, near the central bus station, has stalls of cheese, charcuterie, spices and fresh produce and a food court, and the Sunday fair in the Largo da Ordem adds street-food stalls to its craft stands.