São Paulo is the largest city in the southern hemisphere and the fourth largest in the world, with a metropolitan population somewhere above twenty million depending on how you define the boundaries, a figure that becomes not abstract but physical the moment you look out from any elevation and see the grid of it extending in every direction to where the haze makes the buildings indistinct. The city grew on coffee money. The first export boom that made Brazil wealthy from the 1880s onward was coffee, and São Paulo sat at the centre of the distribution network, the terminal point of the railway lines that brought beans down from the fazendas of the interior, the processing and trading hub that turned a commodity into export receipts that funded the immigration schemes that brought Italian, Japanese, and Lebanese workers in the millions, whose descendants now make São Paulo’s food culture one of the most diverse and genuinely interesting in the world.
The Italian immigration was the largest in scale: over two million Italians arrived in São Paulo state between 1880 and 1930, concentrated in the coffee-growing regions and in the city itself, and the result is a city where pizza and pasta have been eaten for so long and adapted so thoroughly to local ingredients and preferences that they are no longer quite Italian and are entirely São Paulo. The Japanese community, the largest outside Japan at over one and a half million people, is concentrated in the Liberdade neighbourhood and produces sushi and ramen that has been similarly adapted over a century to local tastes without losing the technical precision of the original traditions. The Lebanese influence, arriving from the 1890s onward, runs through the city’s street food in ways that are easier to taste than to trace.
What I was not prepared for was the cost. Brazil prices things for Brazilians with Brazilian incomes in the currency of a country that manages its exchange rate to protect domestic industry, and the result for visitors is that a beer costs more in São Paulo than it does in Sydney, which costs more than it does in Singapore, which costs more than it does in Bangkok. This is not immediately intuitive about a country that is classified as an emerging economy, but it is consistently and emphatically true. The food at the city’s better restaurants is priced at European levels. The supermarkets are priced at levels that reflect a domestic economy where the middle class has spending power and where imported goods have survived a tariff structure that is not gentle. We adjusted our expectations and found that the city rewarded the adjustment: eaten well and at the right establishments, São Paulo is excellent. It is simply not the budget destination that the travel hierarchy of South America sometimes implies.
The architecture is the thing I did not expect. Not the famous examples, the MASP museum building that sits on steel stilts above the Avenida Paulista with the specific confidence of something built by Lina Bo Bardi in 1968, or the curving modernism of Oscar Niemeyer’s contributions to the city, but the everyday architecture of a megalopolis that grew too fast for coherent planning and produced instead an accumulation of styles from every decade of the twentieth century, each layer sitting alongside the others with the casual disorder of a city that never had time to decide what it should look like and settled instead on everything at once. This is either chaotic or fascinating depending on your tolerance for urban disorder. I found it fascinating, which is probably the easier position to hold when you are a visitor rather than someone who has to navigate the traffic.
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