Santos

Portuguese ships knew the island of São Vicente from the first years of the 16th century, and in 1532 Martim Afonso de Sousa founded the town of São Vicente on it. Around 1543 the nobleman Brás Cubas moved the harbour to a calmer site at Enguaguaçu, beside a chapel on a small hill dedicated to Saint Catherine, and built a hospital there, the Santa Casa de Misericórdia de Todos os Santos. The new port took the name of Santos, and became a town in 1546. In 1591 the English privateer Thomas Cavendish sacked it, damaging the young sugar economy of the captaincy.

For three centuries Santos was the outlet of the São Paulo plateau. In the 19th century coffee changed everything: a railway climbed the Serra do Mar, and Santos became Brazil's great coffee port. It was also called the "port of death" for its yellow fever, and in 1899 bubonic plague entered Brazil through it. Around the turn of the 20th century the port was modernised and the engineer Saturnino de Brito drained the island with a system of canals that still crosses the city. In 1922 the official Coffee Exchange opened on Rua XV de Novembro.

From the 1910s Santos also became a seaside resort, and the beachfront gardens were laid out from 1935. As coffee faded the port turned to soya, sugar, maize and containers, and in 2006 oil was found offshore in the Santos Basin. The Coffee Museum opened in 1998 and the Pelé Museum in 2014, part of a revival of the old centre.

Santos is a football city above all. Santos FC, founded in 1912, is one of Brazil's most successful clubs, with eight national titles and three Copa Libertadores, and its name is tied for ever to Pelé, who joined at fifteen and played most of his career for the club. When he died in December 2022, his funeral was held at the stadium. The club's trophy memorial and the Pelé Museum keep his story at the centre of the city's identity.

The city is proud of its history as well. José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, the "Patriarch of Independence", was born here, and the Andradas are remembered in a pantheon in the centre. Santos celebrates its patron saint, Our Lady of Monte Serrat, in September, a cult that grew from a legend about Cavendish's raid. The Coliseu theatre has been brought back into use, and the centre's tram and museums have become part of a cultural revival.

Daily culture revolves around the sea: the beach, the long garden promenade and the cycle path are where santistas walk, cycle, play football and meet. Most residents are Catholic — about three in five at the 2022 census — with smaller evangelical and spiritist communities, and the Basilica of St Anthony in Embaré is a local landmark. The neighbouring cities of São Vicente, Guarujá and Praia Grande have grown together with Santos into one coastal metropolis.

About 419,000 people lived in Santos at the 2022 census, nearly all of them on the urbanised part of the island; the larger mainland part of the municipality is mostly protected Atlantic Forest. Santos is the centre of the Baixada Santista metropolitan region, which has grown into one continuous urban area with São Vicente, Praia Grande and Guarujá.

The port dominates the economy. It handles nearly 29 per cent of Brazil's trade flow, exporting soya, sugar, maize and pulp and importing fertilisers, fuel and wheat, and it employs dockers, hauliers, customs agents and shipping firms across the city. Tourism, commerce and services follow, and offshore oil has brought new work. Average incomes are high by Brazilian standards.

Life is organised around the seafront: tall apartment blocks face the beach from José Menino to Ponta da Praia, while older houses and the port districts lie inland. The hills of the island are a different world, with informal housing at risk of landslides in the summer rains. Heavy trucks bound for the port and the weekend crowds from São Paulo strain the roads, and proposals for a bridge or tunnel to Guarujá are a recurring debate.

Santos eats like a port on the sea. Fish and seafood are the basis of many menus, bought fresh at the fish market near the Guarujá ferry and served at restaurants along the seafront and around Ponta da Praia. The coastal caiçara tradition of São Paulo state contributes dishes such as azul-marinho, fish cooked with green bananas.

Everyday food is the food of the São Paulo coast: per-kilo lunch restaurants, bakeries, and the pastel, a large fried pastry with savoury fillings, often eaten with fresh sugar-cane juice. On the beach, vendors sell coconut water from the shell, snacks and cold drinks, and many families arrive with their own food and cool boxes. The Mercado Municipal in Vila Nova sells produce for home cooking.

Coffee is the city's heritage. The trade that built Santos is remembered at the Coffee Museum in the old exchange, which has its own café, and small strong coffees are drunk through the day as everywhere in Brazil. In the evenings the bars and cafés of Rua XV de Novembro and the seafront districts fill up.