São Paulo, Brazil

History

Fathers Manuel da Nóbrega and José de Anchieta, Jesuit missionaries, founded the village of São Paulo dos Campos de Piratininga on January 25, 1554, when they established the Colégio São Paulo de Piratininga's mission to convert to the Catholic faith the Tupi-Guarani local populations. Because of its excellent location—just beyond the Serra do Mar mountains, above Santos (a coastal city with an important port), and close to the Tietê River—the new settlement became the main entrance from the coast to explore and to colonize the fertile plateau areas that would become the richest Brazilian state. In 1711, this village officially became the city of São Paulo.

São Paulo is considered the most ethnically diverse city in Brazil. Much of this diversity is because of the fact that in 1850, with the end of the traffic [Page 782]of African slaves in Brazil, the state of São Paulo started to replace the slave manpower in its coffee plantations with voluntary European immigrants, most of them from Italy, Portugal, and Spain. The waves of immigrants from the mid-1800s continued until the end of the century.

In 1888, after the complete abolition of slavery in Brazil, São Paulo continued to receive increasingly large numbers of immigrants. By the end of 19th century, the city's population was comprised of significant numbers of Italians, Portuguese, Spaniards, Lebanese, and Syrians.

In the first half of the 20th century, many Japanese immigrants arrived, followed in the 1960s by Chinese and Koreans. During the same time and through the 1970s, great numbers of migrants from the impoverished northeast region of Brazil migrated to São Paulo, helping to build the city's wealth and producing a multiethnic society. It is estimated that people of about 100 different ethnicities call São Paulo their home.

Statistics and Characteristics

By 2010, São Paulo, with a population of about 11 million people living in an area of 588 square miles, was the largest city in Brazil, the world's sixth-largest city, and seventh-largest metropolitan area. It is also the capital of the state of São Paulo, the most populous Brazilian state, and is considered an Alpha world city, the center of the heavily urbanized São Paulo metropolitan area, with about 20 million inhabitants distributed among 39 municipalities in 3,067 square miles.

São Paulo occupied, in 2008, the 10th place among the top 30 urban agglomerations by estimated gross domestic product (GDP) according to United Nations data and is expected to be the sixth in 2025 based on projections using the same data. According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), the city's GDP in 2007 was about $173.7 billion, equivalent to approximately 14.9 percent of the Brazilian GDP. If it were an independent country, its economy would be among the 50 greatest in the world, greater than countries like Egypt and Kuwait.

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