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Sao Paulo
Brazil's industrial colossus and the largest city in the Southern Hemisphere
A grey ocean of towers stretching to every horizon, Sao Paulo is the engine room of South America. More than twenty-two million people crowd its sprawling metropolitan region, a relentless, polyglot megacity built on coffee fortunes and forged into the continent's financial and industrial heart. It is a place of helicopters threading between skyscrapers, of vast Japanese, Italian, and Lebanese communities, and of a restless energy that earns it the nickname Sampa. Nowhere else in the hemisphere concentrates so much human ambition, capital, and concrete in one breathless, ever-expanding sprawl.
The city sits on a plateau roughly 760 metres above the Atlantic, about 70 kilometres inland from the port of Santos, its climate cooler and wetter than the tropical coast below. The Tiete and Pinheiros rivers thread through it, long ago straightened and engineered into channels lined by expressways. Sao Paulo's growth has been almost entirely vertical and horizontal at once, with no natural barrier to check it, and the built-up area now bleeds into neighbouring municipalities to form one of the world's largest contiguous urban expanses, perpetually short of water in dry years.
Jesuit missionaries founded a mission school here in 1554, but Sao Paulo slumbered as a frontier town until the late nineteenth-century coffee boom flooded it with wealth and immigrants. Factories followed the railways, and by the twentieth century the city had eclipsed Rio as Brazil's economic capital. Today it drives a vast share of national output, hosts the Bovespa stock exchange, and sustains a cultural life of world-class museums, sprawling street art, and a dining scene that ranges from corner lanchonetes to some of Latin America's finest restaurants.