São Paulo Highlights
From the Jesuit mission where the city began to Niemeyer's curves, Japantown, and the street-art alleys of Vila Madalena.
Trip Stops
- 1
One of the world's largest neo-Gothic cathedrals, with room for 8,000 people. Its 61-bell carillon is the largest in Central and South America.
📍 São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
- 2
The Jesuit church and school where the city was founded with a mass on 25 January 1554. What you see is a 20th-century reconstruction of the original mud-and-straw mission.
📍 São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
- 3
A 1933 market hall lit by 72 stained-glass windows showing food production. It's the home of the towering mortadella sandwich and the pastel de bacalhau.
📍 São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
- 4
Brazil's first skyscraper, 105 m tall when it opened in 1929. Its Italian-born owner built a mansion on the roof and moved in to prove it was safe.
📍 São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
- 5
An opera-house landmark inspired by the Palais Garnier in Paris, opened in 1911. It hosted the 1922 Week of Modern Art that launched Brazilian modernism.
📍 São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
- 6
Oscar Niemeyer's wavy 1966 apartment block holds about 1,160 flats and around 5,000 residents. It's so big it has its own postal code.
📍 São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
- 7
A Victorian railway station with a British-built frame, opened in 1901 to ship coffee to the port of Santos. It now houses the Museum of the Portuguese Language.
📍 São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
- 8
The city's oldest art museum (1905), with a deliberately exposed-brick interior renovated by Paulo Mendes da Rocha. Its original dome was never built.
📍 São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
- 9
São Paulo's Japantown, in a country with the largest Japanese-descended population outside Japan. Before 1891 the square was the Campo da Forca, the 'Field of the Gallows'.
📍 São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
- 10
The financial and cultural spine of the city, opened in 1891 as a boulevard of coffee barons' mansions. It closes to cars on Sundays and fills with walkers, cyclists, and musicians.
📍 São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
- 11
Lina Bo Bardi's 1968 red concrete-and-glass box hangs from two beams over a 74 m open span. Inside, paintings float on glass easels rather than hanging on walls.
📍 São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
- 12
A hands-on museum built under the stands of Pacaembu Stadium, opened in 2008 with Pelé on hand. You can try a penalty kick and relive the 1950 World Cup.
📍 São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
- 13
An open-air graffiti gallery in Vila Madalena that began with a single Batman painted on a wall in the 1980s. The murals are repainted constantly, so no two visits look alike.
📍 São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
- 14
The city's central park, opened in 1954 for São Paulo's 400th anniversary with Niemeyer-designed pavilions. It holds the Museu Afro Brasil, the largest collection of its kind in the country.
📍 São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
- 15
A Versailles-inspired palace-monument overlooking the spot where Dom Pedro I declared independence in 1822. It reopened on 7 September 2022 after nearly a decade of restoration.
📍 São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
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