Jesuit plateau college that became the Americas' largest city
Sao Paulo began on 25 January 1554 when Jesuits led by Manuel da Nobrega and Jose de Anchieta raised a plateau college. It is now Brazil's biggest city and the most populous urban center in South America and across the Western and Southern Hemispheres.
The Piratininga plains along the Tietê were home to Tupi peoples including the Tupiniquim, Guaianás and Guarani, organised in chiefdoms; the cacique Tibiriçá was known for backing the Portuguese. Indigenous names still mark the map, from Ipiranga and Anhangabaú to Barueri and Cotia. The twelve Jesuits who founded the college chose a steep hill between two rivers, where local workers built them a rammed-earth structure, and named it for the conversion of Paul, whose feast fell on the founding day. The Serra do Mar range cut the site off from the coast.
Settlers moved in from 1560, when Governor-General Mem de Sá relocated the people of São Bernardo do Campo beside the college, on a hill that was easier to defend. For two centuries the town stayed poor and isolated, living on subsistence crops grown by Indigenous labour, and for a long time it was the only colonial village in the interior. It became head of its captaincy in 1681, with celebrations in 1683, and later served as the launch point for the bandeirante expeditions that pushed Brazil's frontiers inland. Real wealth arrived with the coffee boom of the mid-19th century.
The city has staged pivotal national moments, among them the Cry of Ipiranga, the 1932 Revolution, the Diretas Já push for direct elections and the Modern Art Week. Economically it generates around a tenth of Brazil's GDP and just over a third of its state's, is the only Brazilian city past one trillion reais, and hosts B3, Latin America's largest stock exchange by market value, with financial districts along Paulista, Faria Lima and Berrini avenues. It holds 63 per cent of the multinationals established in Brazil and produces about a third of the country's science.
Culturally it is credited with samba paulista, sertanejo, homegrown rock and hip-hop and the rural caipira kitchen, plus dishes such as the coxinha, the bauru and pastel de feira. UNESCO lists it as a City of Film, and GaWC rates it an alpha global city.
Source: São Paulo
