|
The city of São Paulo celebrates today 451 years of history. From the school founded by the priest José de Anchieta in 1554, the city evolved to turn into the greatest and richest city in Brazil and the main business center in Latin America.
According to preliminary information from the São Paulo Convention & Visitors Bureau (SPCVB), a private foundation, which has the aim of promoting tourism in São Paulo, the city hosted last year 7.5 million visitors, which represents an increase of 15.38% in relation to 2003. Of this total, 1.5 million were foreigners.
The main thing in the city is the so called 'business tourism'. According to the executive president at the SPCVB, Roberto Gheler, 70% of the people who visit São Paulo come for work purposes.
For 2005, he foresees that the number of visitors will increase to 8.5 million, where 1.7 million will be foreigners. Until 2010, the Bureau expects the number of tourists to reach 15 million.
"The number of international events is increasing. Last year, with the city's 450th anniversary celebrations and important events such as the World Cultural Forum, the Urbis (International Congress of Cities) and the Unctad (11th United Nations Conference on Trade and Development), the image of the city was promoted around the world as a place with infrastructure to host activities such as these," declared Gheler.
According to information from the city hall, it receives annually about 70,000 regional, national and international events, in the most varied sectors, such as culture, sports and business.
One of these occasions, which in Gheler's opinion proves the city meets the international public's demands, is the Formula 1 Grand Prix Brazil, which has been taking place in the Interlagos race track, in the south of the city of São Paulo, for 15 years. Before this, the GP took place in the city of Rio de Janeiro.
Amongst other major events in the city is the São Paulo Fashion Week, the main fashion event in the country; the International Cinema Festival, the Book Biennial and the Arts Biennial.
São Paulo currently has more than 240,000 square meters of spaces destined for trade fairs and exhibits and, according to Gheler, there are more than 60,000 rooms in hotels, "where half of them are practically new."
Leisure
But São Paulo does not only live off business. "One of our activities is to motivate people to stay longer, so that they can enjoy the leisure options," stated the executive. According to him, "business tourists" spend on average US$ 280 per day in their stay in the city.
In this sense, according to him, the city counts on "the largest cultural heritage in the Southern Hemisphere."
Information from the city hall says there are 223 movie theatres, 92 theatres and 70 museums. São Paulo is also a great center for shopping.
In all, according to the city hall, the city counts on more than 230,000 commercial establishments and 70 shopping malls.
The city also has one of the greatest gastronomic diversities in the world, with restaurants serving dishes from 40 different countries.
There are 3,000 restaurants considered of international class, according to Gheler, in a total of 12,500 establishments, according to the city hall. And not mentioning the nightlife, with 15,000 bars and nightclubs.
This diversity in flavours has its origin in the presence of immigrants of various nationalities who helped build the city and the country, and reflects its cosmopolitan character.
Currently there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of descendants of Arabs, Africans, Germans, Armenians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, Japanese, Chinese and Koreans amongst others.
The Arabs, mainly the Syrians and the Lebanese, had a fundamental role in the construction of the modern São Paulo. It is estimated that about 1 million Arabs and descendants live in the city today. Many traditional companies and institutions from the city of São Paulo were founded by these immigrants.
The 4th Largest in the World
As well as being the main business center in Latin America, São Paulo is one of the largest urban agglomerates in the world, losing only to Tokyo, in Japan, Mexico City and Mumbai, in India.
The population of the city is of about 10.6 million people. If considering the metropolitan region of São Paulo, which adds up to 39 cities including the capital (São Paulo), the number of inhabitants reaches 18.9 million, or 10% of the country's population.
São Paulo is the capital of the state of São Paulo and represents more than 32% of Brazil's Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which in 2003 added up to US$ 579.3 billion.
In spite of the advances in the services sector and the development of the industrial hubs in other regions of the country, the city is still the main industrial center in Brazil and 15% of its economy is linked to the transformation industry, according to the Information director of the State System for Data Analysis (Seade) Foundation, Rivaldo Conte.
ANBA – Brazil-Arab News Agency
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.