From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

São Paulo is a state in Brazil. It is the major industrial and economic powerhouse of the Brazilian economy. It is named after Saint Paul. São Paulo has the largest population, the biggest industrial park and the biggest economic production of the country. It is the most populous subnational entity in the Western Hemisphere. The capital, São Paulo, is also the largest city in South America. Gastronomy and culture are main strengths of this city, nicknamed "the land of the drizzle". Barretos receives a large number of visitors every year for the Festa do Peão de Boiadeiro, a rodeo. Brotas is a popular destination for the eco-tourists and adventurers. A popular place to visit during winter is Campos do Jordão.

The state of São Paulo has an area of approximately 248,800 km² (95.700 mi²), and a population of about 40 million (21.5% of the population of Brazil), which makes it the most populous country subdivision in the Western Hemisphere. The climate of São Paulo is tropical to subtropical, altitude being the largest contributor to what variation there is. The capital, São Paulo City, barely outside the tropics in the south of the state and about 800 meters (2,600 ft) above sea level, has daily minima and maxima averaging about 19°C and 28°C (66°F and 82°F) respectively at the warmest time of year and about 12°C and 22°C (54°F and 72°F) respectively at the coolest time of year. Temperatures reach around 33°C (91°F) on the hottest days and fall as low as 5°C (41°F) on the coldest nights. In the low-lying northwest of the state, temperatures average around 4°C (7°F) higher.

São Paulo is the richest state in Brazil. It has the second highest per-capita income (lower than only the Federal District) and, with the states of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina, the highest standard of living in Brazil, despite the poverty in some peripheral parts of the largest cities.

São Paulo (city)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Downtown São Paulo, showing the landmark buildings Italia (at left) and Copan (curved façade at center).

São Paulo is the largest city in Brazil, with its metropolitan area ranking seventh among the largest urban areas in the world. The city is the capital of the State of São Paulo, the most populous Brazilian state. It is also the richest city of Brazil. The name means Saint Paul in Portuguese. São Paulo exerts global influence in commerce and finance as well as arts and entertainment.

The city has many renowned landmarks. The Immigrant's Hostel greeted millions of immigrants as they came to Brazil in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Paulista Avenue, in Downtown, is the most important financial center of the country and South America. The city is home to the São Paulo Stock Exchange (BOVESPA). São Paulo has been home to several of the tallest buildings in Brazil, including the Mirante do Vale Building.

With an estimated population of 11,105,249 residents within an area of 1,523 square kilometres (588 sq mi), São Paulo is the most populous in Brazil, in South America and in the Southern hemisphere.

The city also lies at the center of the heavily urbanized São Paulo metropolitan area, which, with an estimated 21,616,060 people in 2008 over 7,944 square kilometres (3,067.2 sq mi), is the largest metropolitan area in the nation. Depending on which definition is used for New York's metropolitan area, the São Paulo metropolitan area is ranked as either the second or third most populous in the Americas, just behind Mexico City, and one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world.

People from the city of São Paulo are known as Paulistanos or Paulistas, while paulistas designates anyone from the whole of São Paulo state, including the paulistanos. The city's Latin motto is Non ducor, duco, which translates as "I am not led, I lead". A famous nickname for the city is "Sampa". São Paulo is also known for its unreliable weather, the sheer size of its helicopter fleet, architecture and multitude of skyscrapers. The São Paulo/Guarulhos International Airport connects São Paulo with many Brazilian cities and also operates international flights.
Sao Paulo

Contents

8 Current Critical Problems

9 Major Holidays

10 External links

10.1 Photographs

Highlights

São Paulo is the most important business center of Brazil. As the default location for music concerts, plays, film festivals, fashion shows, and international sports events, São Paulo disputes with Rio de Janeiro the title of Brazil's capital of culture and sports. However, unlike the well-known Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo is not a popular destination for tourists, since its attractions are mostly hidden under a dense, chaotic urban scenery.

The city has a multicultural metropolitan area, which some have compared to New York, with heavy Portuguese, Italian, Arabian and Japanese influences. It is the city with the largest number of Japanese people outside Japan. São Paulo is known for its varied and sophisticated gastronomy, ranging from Chinese to French, from fast food chains to five star restaurants. Its night life is animated by thousands of bars, pubs, lounges, and discos, that cater for a variety of music tastes and are often open all night.

São Paulo is home to the largest university in Brazil (University of São Paulo), to a major art museum (MASP), a major symphonic orchestra (OSESP), a Formula One Grand Prix race track (Interlagos), and the world's largest private-owned sports stadium (Morumbi, site of the São Paulo soccer team).

There are two major airports in the São Paulo metropolitan area: Guarulhos (GRU, for domestic and international flights) and Congonhas (CGH, for domestic flights only).

São Paulo's birthday is January 25, and is a major holiday date in the city.

Economics

São Paulo is the 19th richest city in the world and is expected to be the 13th richest in 2020. According to data of IBGE, its Gross domestic product (GDP) in 2005 was R$ 263,177,148,000.00 (US$ 156,280,780,941.00), equivalent to approximately 12.26% of the Brazilian GDP and 36% of all production of goods and services of the State of São Paulo. One of the biggest financial centres in Brazil and in the world, São Paulo's economy is going through a deep transformation. Once a city with a strong industrial character, São Paulo's economy has become increasingly based on the tertiary sector, focusing on services and businesses for the country. Many analysts point to São Paulo as an important global city, even though this assignment can be criticized considering its serious problems of social exclusion and spacial segregation. Although being the most important financial centre of the country, São Paulo's economy also presents a high degree of informality.

Itaim Bibi Financial District.

São Paulo is the business center of the Mercosur economy. Acclaimed as a city of business tourism, attracting today's biggest and most important international events, be they in the economic, cultural, scientific or sporting area, it is a metropolis that offers a service infrastructure of the highest efficiency and quality. The city hosts from small meetings to large exhibitions. It holds more than 200 events per day, offering more than 250 thousand square meters of space in pavilions and areas for congresses and fairs. This is without taking into account the supply of spaces within hotels, which adds another 70 thousand square meters, suitable for holding events. Adding space in nightclubs, cultural and business areas, clubs and other alternatives to these numbers, São Paulo boasts approximately 430,000 square meters for the holding of any type of event. There is still the supply of approximately 30,000 apartments of various categories, a number which is to grow significantly in the next two years, predicted to reach 50,000 apartments in 2003, catering for those seeking the more luxurious options of the large chains, to simpler and more economical options. It is worth pointing out that from the tourist attractions the following stand out: gastronomy and culture. With more than 12,000 restaurants of more than 40 different world cuisines, besides the 70 museums, more than 200 cinemas, around 50 theaters, art galleries and cultural centers, São Paulo has one of the liveliest night-lives in the world.

Sao Paulo

If the city of São Paulo were a country, its economy would be the 47th in the world, bigger than Egypt and Kuwait, about the same size as Hungary or New Zealand, about 85% of Israel. The economy of the city of São Paulo would also be bigger than 22 of the U.S. States. There are about 30,000 millionaires living in São Paulo, 60% of all millionaires in Brazil. In 2005, the city of São Paulo collected R$ 90 billion in taxes, and the budget of the city spent R$ 15 billion; these figures show that São Paulo contributes to wealthiness distribution. The city has 1,500 bank branches. There are 70 shopping malls. Of all the international companies with business in Brazil, 63% have their head offices in São Paulo. According to Mystery Shopping International, the Oscar Freire Street is one of the eight most luxurious in the world.[38] The São Paulo Stock Exchange (BM&F Bovespa) is Brazil's official stock and bonds exchange. The BM&F Bovespa is the largest stock exchange in Latin America and third largest in the world. In the Stocks Exchange, R$ 6 billion (US$ 3.5 billion) change hands every day.

The per capita income for the city was R$ 24,083 (2005).

Some of the last São Paulo mayors were:

A simulated-color satellite image of the Greater São Paulo metropolitan area (center), and the coastal towns of Santos and São Vicente (below).

Culture

The theme of the 26th Bienal de São Paulo was chosen to enable a wide range of artistic positions to feel comfortable. The concept of “Território Livre” (Free territory) involves various dimensions: it has a physical-geographical, a socio-political as well as an aesthetic dimension – the latter, of course, being of greatest interest to us in the context of this exhibition.

The territory of aesthetics begins where the normal world ends. It describes the space in which reality and imagination are in conflict with each another. Artists are the border guards of a realm that lies beyond the administered world, where politics and economics have no more jurisdiction over interpretation. While the whole world is constantly arguing about what belongs to whom, art clarifies the ownership issue in its own way: in the realm of aesthetics everything belongs to everyone.

What interests us in the context of the Bienal is how the devastations of the real world and interpersonal relations are reflected in art. Since works of art are more than bare facts, an artistic condensing of phenomena of reality will always be more ambiguous and more complex than simple reporting. This rule even applies if the artist uses photography and video, i.e., two media regarded as being very close to reality. Although artists are embedded into conflicts, they do not copy the world, but create free spaces within reality. With the help of metaphors and symbols they transform the earthly raw material into a new condition that can be experienced by the senses. The work of art reveals the other; it is allegory. Art exists outside of causality and must not be imprisoned in the iron casing of mundane constraints.

Artists create a power-free zone, a world that runs contrary to the existing world: a land of emptiness, of silence and respite, where the frenzy that surrounds us is brought to a standstill for a moment. But it is also a land of enigmas, where the flood of images surging in on us from the breeding grounds of kitsch are encrypted. By breaking through the barriers of the material world, the artist becomes a smuggler of images between cultures.

55 countries from all continents have accepted our invitation to bring the best and most relevant of their present production to São Paulo. Most artists have created new work after preliminary visits to gain onsite knowledge concerning the building and the city. There is a spatial interaction between the 55 artists of the “national representations” and the 80 artists invited directly by the Bienal. With a total of 135 artists, the Bienal de São Paulo remains one of the biggest international exhibitions. The 25th Bienal turned out to be the most highly attended exhibition of contemporary art in the world in 2002 with 670,000 visitors. This year there will again be a major, systematic program of guided tours to introduce contemporary art to a whole generation of pupils and students, including many from the poorer suburbs of São Paulo.

In order to emphasize the thematic unity of the overall exhibition, the invited artists and those representing the countries are mixed together on the 25,000 square meters of the spacious Oscar Niemeyer Pavilion. So, despite the complexity of individual voices, the end result will be a common concert.

As always, the biggest contingent of artists comes from Brazil: like all the countries it has an artist in the “national representations” segment, while another 19 Brazilians were integrated into the list of 80 invited artists from all over the world. The regions São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and the rest of the country are equally represented, each providing one-third of the invited Brazilian artists.

In addition to an intensification of the North-South dialog, the Bienal´s aims include the promoting of links between non-European cultures along a South-South orientation.

It is predestined for this task, being based in one of the largest and most pluricultural cities in the world, where European, African, indigenous and Asian elements mix and enter into productive relationships.

The Bienal Building itself – a cosmopolitan icon of modern architecture made of concrete, steel and glass that also embodies the city’s industrial heritage – automatically places each work of art into a context of modernity and offers perfect conditions for presenting and appreciating contemporary art over an area measuring the equivalent of four soccer pitches.Its airy vault and its projecting ramp that cuts, baroque-like, through all three floors in irresistible spirals make it a privileged venue.

Special attention was therefore devoted to the allocation of space. Conceptual, aesthetic and technical criteria were taken into account. The point of departure was the architecture of the building itself, which suggests a spatial grouping of media. The spacious ground floor, with a ceiling height of over seven meters and panoramic view of Ibirapuera Park, is particularly suitable for a sculpture park with large, free-standing three-dimensional works. The first half of the second floor offers ideal conditions for a salon of painting, thanks to the favorable light that comes in from the east and west and, diffusely, from above and below. The second, darker half of this middle floor is perfect for a “multiplex” of video installations, a planetarium in which viewers can lose themselves, undisturbed, in the cosmos of digitally generated pictures.

This arrangement not only helps the visitors to keep their bearings, but also makes it easier to reach a critical mass within each medium. Various gravitational centers with their respective specific aesthetic “temperatures” thus develop in the building. Crescendi and diminuendi alternate abruptly.

Photography, which allows cross-references to painting, sculpture and video, forms a central connecting link between the other three techniques and runs like a thread through the entire exhibition. The Bienal as an extraterritorial zone

There has never been a lack of attempts to create free territories in Brazil. We simply have to remind ourselves of the founding of Brasília, and before that, a good fifty years ago, of the Bienal de São Paulo. Both are natural allies, as they were created by the same enlightened spirit, and share the call to change. Each was conceived as a quarry of new images, and together they have smoothed the country’s path towards modernity.

The Bienal de São Paulo is an extraterritorial zone where artists erect their utopian settlements. It is a sanctuary where the streams of goods run dry and political strategies are to no avail. The Bienal sees itself as a place for retreat where critical mass and positive energy can be concentrated and combined to create basic formulas for transforming society and conjuring up premonitions of future forms of human social life. Each generation of artists is called upon to make a new survey of this no-man’s-land and to draft its contours.

The arts are unique in that they possess a universal reservoir of signs and archetypes which, through exchange, mobilize the collective memory of mankind. If the artist is an image smuggler, therefore, the Bienal can act as an emporium in the realm of aesthetics, where curiosity and the desire to discover suffice as a passport, and an alert mind serves as the entrance ticket to a place where priceless goods are traded yet no customs duties are levied.

History

The city was founded on January 25, 1554, by Portuguese Jesuit missionaries José de Anchieta and Manoel da Nóbrega, who established a mission — the Colégio de São Paulo de Piratininga — to convert the Tupi-Guarani indians. Located just beyond the Serra do Mar cliffs overlooking the port city of Santos, and close to the Tietê River, the new settlement became the natural entrance to the vast and fertile plateau that would eventually become the State of São Paulo.

São Paulo became officially a city in 1711. It experienced a boom during coffee cycle, starting in the late 19th century — chiefly because of its privileged position next to the port of Santos, through which most of the country's exports were shipped.

After 1881, waves of immigrants from Italy, Japan and other countries arrived in São Paulo, at first to work on the enormous coffee plantations established in the State. In the 20th century, with the industrial development of the country, many of them moved to the capital; which also attracted new contingents of immigrants, including Lebanese, Armenians, Greek, Jews, Chinese, Koreans and Lithuanians.

Transportation

The city is crossed by many of the most important expressways of the country, like the BR-116, SP-330, Castelo Branco and Imigrantes. Some railways also cross the city. They are, however, very old and were constructed intending not to attend people, but to transport coffee to Santos's seaport. Santos continue to have Brazil's busiest seaport thanks to São Paulo's needings (exportation and importation of industrializated goods).

São Paulo has two airports. Congonhas Airport operates domestic and regional flights (mainly Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and Brasília. Campo de Marte handles some private and small airplanes. Both are very busy airports. Guarulhos International Airport, located 25 km from the city operates domestic and international flights to the city, in the neighbooring city of Guarulhos.

The city has aproximately 60 km of subway (metro) system, complemented by another 60 km of CPMT trams (railways). They are not sufficient to attend the city in a efficient manner.

São Paulo grew quickly during the 1940s to the 1980s and many roads and buildings were quickly constructed without major planning. As a result, heavy traffic is common in the arterial avenues of the city, and traffic jams are relatively common in the arterial highways (mainly during floods). The main mean of commuting the city is the car and the bus.

Ethnic Diversity

São Paulo has a great ethnic diversity that can compare to New York or Toronto:

3 million people are direct or indirect descendants of Portuguese.
3 million people are direct or indirect descendants of Italians. There is a building named Edifício Itália (Italy Building), in honor to the Italians. It was once the tallest building of the city (165m).
3 million people have direct or indirect African heritage.
1 million people are direct or indirect descendants of Japanese. São Paulo has the largest number of Japanese outside Japan.
1 million people are direct or indirect descendants of Germans.
350 thousand people are direct or indirect descendants of Lebanese.

Other considerable groups are:

Current Critical Problems

Since the beggining of the XX century, São Paulo has been the major economic city of Brazil. With the advent of the two Great Wars and the Great Depression, exportation of coffee to the US and Europe was critically affected, which led the rich coffee farmers to invest in industrialization in the city. This attracted many people from other regions of the country, especially 'nordestinos' (name given to the people who lives in the poor Brazilian Northeast). From a 32,000 habitants in 1880, São Paulo had aproximately 250,000 in 1900, 1,800,000 in 1940, 4,750,000 in 1960 and 8,500,000 in 1980. The effects of this in the city:

São Paulo grew quickly and in a very disorganized manner. With no proper organization, the city grew without leaving much space for highways and parks. Until now, big traffic jams are relatively common in many roadways of the city.
A very common scene (that can still be seen today) is of 'nordestinos' arriving in packed buses, in the Bus Terminal of the city, in the search of a better life (ironically, it is also common nowadays to see these same buses to carry 'nordestinos' back to their homeland). Many of these people don't find a job, many of them do not have any kind of education (most are illiterate), and most, when realizing that their dream of a better life is over, don't have the money to go back, and stay in the city. Many go to 'favelas' (very poor communities in the suburbs of the city), and others live in the streets (as homeless). Aproximately 1,500,000 people now live in favelas.
Crime increased, and kidnappings and robbery are relatively common in the city. Many hate crimes were committed by people who discriminate against 'nordestinos' (who are commonlly associated with the high criminality in the city).
Floods are common nowadays in São Paulo. This is due to the fact that the city grew in so unorganized a way that the ground where the city lies was made impermeable. Rainwater does not have anywhere to go (other than the small rivers that crosses the city) and water accumulates quickly.
São Paulo is the Brazilian London. Polution is high in the air and the Tiête River, which crosses the river, is critically polluted (like the Thames was in London).
The city has so many high-rise buildings that the city is sometimes called 'Selva de Pedra' (Stone Forest). Although the city has lots of parks spread over the city, the per capita green area of São Paulo is very small. This fact, together with the high criminality, led to a reclusion in the lives of many people in the city. Condos equipped with cameras and homes and apartments with windows equipped with bars are standard in the city and Shopping Centers are the main entertainment to middle-class people (which are afraid to go to open areas or any other that they may think that is not safe enough for them).

Major Holidays

January 1 - New Year
January 25 - São Paulo's birthday
Between January and March - Carnival (it is a Brazil's national holiday, and it is not regular. It is always during the two days following a weekend, and the holiday finishes itself at 11:59 am in in the 3rd day (a Wednesday, Quarta-Feira de Cinzas)
In the beginning of April - Páscoa (Easter)
April 22 - Brazil's Discovery Day
May 1 - Labor's Day
1st Sunday of May - Mother's Day
June - Festa Junina
July 9 - Constitutional Revolution of 1932
1st Sunday of August - Father's Day
October 12 - Children's Day / Nossa Senhora Aparecida (Appeared Our Lady's Day)
November 2 - All Souls Day
November 15 - Republic's Day
December 24 - Christmas Eve
December 25 - Christmas
December 31 - Last day of the year

External links

São Paulo City Hall website (http://www.prefeitura.sp.gov.br) (in Portuguese)
São Paulo city official tourism site (http://anhembi.terra.com.br/turismo/eng/default.asp)

Photographs

Virtual postcards (http://anhembi.terra.com.br/turismo/eng/) (requires to locate and click on the option entitled "postcards")
Brazil Skyscrapers (http://www.brazilskyscrapers.hpg.com.br) - Many Photos of São Paulo and its skyscrapers
A very complete photo album (http://members.aol.com/pochetti5/sampa-brazil.html)