Brazil's only French-founded state capital sits on an island
Sao Luis, capital of Maranhao, occupies Sao Luis Island in Saint Mark's Bay. Begun as Saint-Louis-de-Maragnan under Equinoctial France, it remains Brazil's sole French-started state capital and joins Vitoria and Florianopolis as island seats of state power.
Before Europeans came, the site was a large Tupinambá village. French colonists arrived in 1612 under Daniel de la Touche and Admiral François de Razilly, hoping to anchor a colony called Equinoctial France, and built a fort named for Louis XIII and his sainted forebear Louis IX; its construction on 8 September is taken as the city's founding. Portugal captured it at the battle of Guaxenduba in 1615 and gave it the Portuguese form of the name. Because the French had so little time to build anything, historians still argue over which power really founded the city.
In November 1641 a thousand Dutch West India Company troops under Admiral Jan Cornelisz Lichthart seized the town and plundered its Catholic churches and images. Fighting dragged on for 27 months until the Dutch gave up to José Constantino Gomes de Castro and left Maranhão on 28 February 1644. A diocese was seated here in 1677, and the colonial economy rested on exports of sugar, cacao and tobacco. Quarrels between Jesuits, who opposed enslaving Indigenous people, and landowners erupted in the Beckman brothers' revolt against Portuguese authority.
The American Civil War brought a windfall, as the region began selling cotton to Britain; the money modernised the city, improved its water supply and staffed its schools, and São Luís briefly ranked as Brazil's third-largest city before agriculture declined late in the 19th century. Today its ports of Madeira and Itaqui ship a large share of the country's iron ore, and metallurgy through Alumar and Vale dominates industry.
The city proper had about 1.09 million people in the 2024 census, with 1.5 million in the metro area. Its 17th-century centre keeps its original street plan and became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997, part of what is described as Latin America's richest ensemble of Portuguese colonial architecture. So many writers came from here, among them Gonçalves Dias and Aluísio Azevedo, that it earned the nickname Brazilian Athens, while a passion for reggae makes it the Brazilian Jamaica too.
Source: São Luís, Maranhão
