São Paulo

São Paulo began on 25 January 1554, when Jesuit priests founded the Colégio de São Paulo de Piratininga on the plateau above the coast, and it is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the Americas. For much of the colonial period it was a frontier town and the starting point of the bandeirantes, the expeditions that pushed Portuguese control deep into the interior. A law school opened in the Convent of São Francisco in 1827, but as late as 1880 the city had only about 32,000 people.

Coffee changed everything. Plantation wealth flowed into the city, the São Paulo Railway linked it with the port of Santos, and after abolition in 1888 large numbers of immigrants arrived — mainly Portuguese, Italians and Spaniards, and also Japanese and Arabs. In 1920 nearly 80 per cent of the population were immigrants or their descendants. Coffee barons built mansions along the new Avenida Paulista, opened in 1900; the second Luz Station rose at the turn of the century, the Martinelli Building became Brazil's first skyscraper in 1929, and the city passed its first million in 1928. When the world crisis hit coffee, planters invested in factories, and São Paulo became the country's largest industrial centre.

In 1932 the city rose against Getúlio Vargas in the Constitutionalist Revolution. The University of São Paulo was founded in 1934, and the fourth centenary in 1954 brought Ibirapuera Park and the inauguration of the cathedral. Migrants from the north-east poured in, the population reached 8.5 million by 1980, the metro opened in 1974, and the financial centre moved from the old centre to Avenida Paulista and later to Faria Lima and Berrini.

São Paulo is Brazil's cultural capital as much as its business one. The Week of Modern Art at the Theatro Municipal in 1922 launched Brazilian modernism, the Bienal, founded in 1951, is the third-oldest art biennial in the world, and MASP, the Pinacoteca and dozens of other museums make it the country's art centre. Lina Bo Bardi and Oscar Niemeyer left some of their best-known buildings here.

Immigration defines the city. More people of Italian descent live here than in any Italian city, it has the largest Japanese community outside Japan and one of the largest Arab diasporas, and people from more than 200 countries have settled here. Liberdade, Bixiga and Bom Retiro still carry the marks of those waves, while migrants from north-eastern Brazil have settled here since the 19th century. The city's own forms include samba paulista, Brazilian hip-hop and rock, and the caipira culture of the interior.

The city's major football clubs are Corinthians, Palmeiras and São Paulo. The LGBT Pride Parade on Avenida Paulista, held since 1997, is listed as the largest in the world and is one of the city's biggest events, alongside the Formula One Grand Prix, Carnival and the Virada Cultural. In 2026 funding for the parade was reported to have fallen by 60 per cent, largely because of conservative movements.

The municipality had about 11.45 million people in the 2022 census, and Greater São Paulo, 39 municipalities in all, more than 20 million — one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. The municipality covers more than 1,500 square kilometres, most of it built up, and still holds large forests such as Cantareira on its northern edge.

São Paulo produces around a tenth of Brazil's GDP. It is the headquarters of B3, Latin America's largest stock exchange, and its business districts run along Avenida Paulista, Faria Lima and Berrini. It is also one of Latin America's largest health-care hubs, home to the Hospital das Clínicas and major private hospitals, and a centre of industry, media, fashion and research.

Inequality is the city's defining issue. An estimated 2.1 million people in the metropolitan area live in favelas, while the wealthy live in gated towers and use the world's largest fleet of helicopters, based at Campo de Marte. Long commutes from the self-built periphery, heavy traffic, air pollution and water supply drawn from distant river basins are constant concerns, and summer storms regularly flood streets: on 25 January 2025 the city recorded one of its heaviest daily rainfalls on record. The working day starts early and evenings run late, in bars, restaurants and the growing number of cultural centres.

São Paulo eats the food of its immigrants. Pizza is the city's passion: by one count six thousand pizzerias make about a million pizzas a day, from old Italian cantinas in Bixiga to neighbourhood delivery places. The city counts among its own creations the bauru, the beirute sandwich, calabresa sausage, coxinha (shredded chicken in a teardrop of fried dough), parmegiana and picanha, the prized cut of the Brazilian barbecue.

Sandwiches are a local art. The bauru — roast beef, tomato, pickled cucumber and cheese melted in a bain-marie, in a hollowed pão francês — was created at the Ponto Chic in 1934 for a law student nicknamed Bauru. At the Mercadão the speciality is a mortadella sandwich, thick slices piled into a pão francês roll. At the weekly street markets, the pastel de feira, a large fried pastry filled with cheese or meat, comes with caldo de cana, fresh sugar-cane juice.

Japanese food has been part of the city since the first immigrants arrived to work on the coffee farms; by the 1990s Japanese restaurants were found throughout the city, including the temakeria, a fast-food sushi bar unique to Brazil. Esfihas, open pastries topped with spiced meat brought by Arab immigrants from the Levant, are everyday snacks, and the day is punctuated by a small, strong cafezinho.