Curitiba turned planning into a global brand
Paraná's capital sits on a plateau 932 metres up and had 1,829,225 residents in 2024, making it Brazil's eighth-largest city. Its biggest boom came after the 1960s, when a master plan built around fast linear transit routes helped it grow from hundreds of thousands past a million.
The name may come from Tupi words meaning many araucaria seeds, after the Paraná pine cones that once carpeted the area, or from Tupi for pine plus large amount. The Portuguese settled the site in 1693 under a long devotional name honouring Our Lady of Light among the pines, renamed it Curitiba in 1721, and made it an official town in 1812 under the spelling Curityba. Newspapers and officials also wrote Coritiba until a 1919 state decree settled on Curitiba.
Drovers moving herds from Rio Grande do Sul to São Paulo made it a trading stop, and cattle drove its first expansion. From 1850 to 1950 logging of Paraná pine, then mate and coffee, kept it growing, and yerba mate barons built mansions still preserved in Batel and Alto da Glória. Germans, many of them Volga Germans from Russia, arrived after 1850 along with Poles, Italians and Ukrainians, and a railway to the port of Paranaguá opened in 1885.
In the 1940s and 1950s the French urbanist Alfred Agache drew up a plan with a star of boulevards, only partly built because it was too costly. By 1960 the population had reached 430,000, and young planners led by Jaime Lerner of the Federal University of Paraná answered Mayor Ivo Arzua with the Curitiba Master Plan, adding high-speed transit corridors, calming downtown traffic, curbing sprawl and protecting the historic centre. Lerner then set up the city's first planning department.
Curitiba won the Global Sustainable City Award in 2010 and has a very high Human Development Index of 0.856. About half its residents were born elsewhere, its economy is Brazil's seventh largest, and it hosted World Cup matches in 1950 and 2014. Frequent floods have led to most rivers being channelled.
Source: Curitiba
