Latin America’s financial capital, built by coffee money and immigration, now worth a stay of its own.

São Paulo was founded on 25 January 1554 by the Jesuit priests José de Anchieta and Manuel da Nóbrega as a mission school, the Colégio de São Paulo de Piratininga, named for the feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul that fell that same day. For over two centuries it remained a remote hilltop settlement, known chiefly as the staging ground for the bandeirantes — armed expeditionary parties who pushed deep into Brazil’s interior from the 1600s onward, extending Portugal’s colonial claims at grave cost to the indigenous peoples they enslaved and displaced along the way. The city’s fortunes changed only with the coffee boom of the late nineteenth century, when profits from the plantations of the surrounding state funded the São Paulo Railway to the port of Santos in 1867 and drew a vast wave of immigration to work the fields and the city’s new factories — above all Italians from the 1880s, and Japanese immigrants beginning with the ship Kasato Maru’s arrival at Santos in 1908, whose descendants today form the largest Japanese community outside Japan itself, still centred on the Liberdade neighbourhood.

That immigrant, industrial city went on to become Brazil’s undisputed financial and industrial capital over the twentieth century, its skyline eventually defined by projects like Oscar Niemeyer’s serpentine Edifício Copan. In 1932, the state rose in the Constitutionalist Revolution against President Getúlio Vargas’s centralising government, an uprising defeated within months but still marked every 9 July as a state holiday and a lasting point of regional pride. The same era gave the city its claim as a cultural capital to match: the Bienal de São Paulo, founded in 1951, is the second-oldest art biennial in the world after Venice’s, and the São Paulo Museum of Art moved into Lina Bo Bardi’s concrete-and-glass building on Avenida Paulista in 1968, suspending its collection on glass easels above the street it still overlooks today.