Brazil’s locomotive state holds one in five Brazilians
São Paulo state, named for Saint Paul of Tarsus, is Brazil’s most populous federation unit—more than 44 million people in 2022, about 22 percent of the nation and the Americas’ most populous sub-national entity. Its economy produces roughly 31 percent of Brazil’s wealth, earning the nickname locomotive of Brazil.
The state spans about 248,219 square kilometres, just 2.9 percent of Brazil, split into 645 municipalities, with the city of São Paulo, the country's largest, as capital. It is the world's 28th-most-populous subnational unit, and in South America only the rest of Brazil, Colombia and Argentina hold more people. Its residents descend largely from Portuguese colonists and from Italians who arrived from the late nineteenth century, alongside Indigenous peoples, Africans brought in slavery, and communities of Japanese, Arab, Armenian, German and even American Southern origin. As a country, its 2020 economy would have ranked 21st in the world, and it has Brazil's lowest homicide rate.
Stone tools at sites such as Rincão I hint that people were here 17,000 years ago, during the last glacial maximum. Tupi peoples later hunted and farmed the area. João Ramalho, a Portuguese sailor possibly shipwrecked around 1510, married a chieftain's daughter and settled, and Martim Afonso de Sousa absorbed his settlement into the São Vicente colony. Jesuits founded the mission that became São Paulo city on 25 January 1554, the feast of Saint Paul's conversion, and by 1600 it had only about 1,500 residents.
From the Tietê river system, bandeirantes pushed deep inland hunting Indigenous captives, gold and diamonds; their trading posts became towns, and their claims pushed Brazil's borders toward the Amazon and the Andes, which is why São Paulo is still called the Bandeirante State. It was near the city in 1822 that Prince Pedro is said to have shouted 'Independence or death!', and Brazil broke from Portugal on 7 September that year, when the town had just 25,000 people.
Coffee enriched a rural elite who shared national power with Minas Gerais in the early republic, and under Vargas the state industrialised early.
Source: São Paulo (state)
