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SÃO PAULO
São Paulo is Brazil’s wealthiest and most populous city and, with 17 million souls in its urban embrace, the largest metropolis in the Western Hemisphere, save Mexico’s capital. The place looks and lives like the big city it is. It throbs to the liveliest nightlife in the country, it contemplates the most diverse cultural and artistic offerings, and it is always racing to take advantage of an extraordinary array of dining and shopping opportunities. Stunning modernist architecture make it the most brightly gleaming gem in the crown of São Paulo state, but there are other, more natural jewels beyond the glass-and-concrete forest of the capital. Magnificent coastline, pleasant mountain towns and wild hinterlands invite beach goers and intrepid adventures alike to journey afield.
To have more information about São Paulo, click here (colocar esse link abaixo da imagem http://www.cidadedesaopaulo.com)
CITY OF SÃO PAULO
HISTORIC CENTER
Though four and a half centuries old, this massive metropolis has yet to slow down. A stroll through the downtown of the third-largest city in the world is accompanied by the buzz of activity surrounding the constant remodeling and restoration projects. Officially, the city center is divided into the old and the new areas, separated by the Vale do Anhangabaú. The borders of the Centro Velho (the old center), located on the right side of valley, are defined by the Pátio do Colégio, Catedral da Sé and the Mosteiro de São Bento, while the Centro Novo (new center), on the left, is bounded by Praça da República and Avenidas Ipiranga, São João and São Luiz.
A COSMOPOLITAN AND GLOBALIZED CITY
Jardins is a magical place where the people of São Paulo share not only the trappings of luxury living but the everyday assurance that they are living in a cosmopolitan metropolis. An island of luxury bounded by the so-called Quadrilátero, an area that expands outwards from the intersection of Ruas Oscar Freire and Haddock Lobo, Jardins is a shopper's paradise reminiscent of Avenue Montaigne in Paris, Sloane Street in London, or upper Madison Avenue in New York.
Although its precise borders are tough to define, one thing is certain: this dense urban enclave runs from the ridge of Avenida Paulista, once lined with the mansions of the coffee barons and industrial magnates and now forrning the great capital's skyline, and slopes down towards an area that up until the 1940's was nothing more than a mangrove swamp, periodically polluted by the flooding Of the Pinheiros river.
Today Jardins is a golden quarter where the women Carry Vuitton purses and prepare for life's hardships in fitness centers. But there was nothing in the district's early history that heralded its future incarnation as Brazil's Beverly Hills. Describing São Paulo in her memoirs Anarquistas, Graças a Deus (Anarchists, Thank God), the writer Zélia Gattai contrasted the wealthy pedigree of Paulista with the area below Alameda Santos. That ghetto's funeral processions and delivery trucks were prohibited on the millionaires’ boulevard, and its buildings, two-story semi-detached houses, were on a much simpler scale.
The construction of an oasis of wealth began in the 1920's with Jardim América, Brazil's first example of urban development. The British real-estate company, Cia City, sold the concept of housing surrounded by lush trees and circular streets reserved for local traffic only. So the area cultivated the mystique that would eventually attract MASP and the Clube Paulistano, as well as the elite of the affluent community.
Driven by its appetite for self-consuming trends, the commercial heart of São Paulo deserted the city center and entrenched itself on Rua Augusta during the 1960’s. Soon it became the new retail and nightlife center, where an auto mobile was an indispensable accessory to any romantic dalliance. While the young rebels of the 70's raced along Augusta at dragster speeds, exemplifying the legend of the city that never stops, the Conjunto Nacional marked the new frontier for the rich and fashionable. Just as years before the Jardiris storefronts had been emblazoned with the names of local fashions like Bibba, Paraphernalia, Spinelli, Old England and Hi-Fi, today the cosmopolitan world of high fashion reveals its fascination with globalization, displaying Armani, Versace, Boss, Cartier, Tiffany, Montblanc, Hermes, Ferragamo, Dior and Baccarat. All within walking distance, although certainly not within the reach of the average pocketbook.
Nirlando Beirão
a joumalist from Minas Gerais who has resigned himself to living in São Paulo, except for the occasional escape. |