The Brazilian city of São Paulo lies south of the equator, straddling the Tropic of Capricorn, and is about as far east as the southern tip of Greenland. It is the homely sister to its more famous neighbor, Rio de Janeiro, which lies about 330 nm to the east and is considered by many to be the most beautiful city in the world. According to a popular Brazilian saying, Rio is for leisure while São Paulo is for work.
With some 19.9 million people, the São Paulo metropolitan area is the most populous in South America and the fourth largest agglomeration in the world, behind Tokyo (35 million); New York (21.7 million); Seoul, South Korea (21.4); and Mexico City (20.9), according to City Population (www.citypopulation.de). It is a city of business and banking, industry and politics, and the primary repository of the wealth of the state of São Paulo, which generates about 45 percent of Brazil’s annual $1 trillion GNP. It is also a city of limited zoning regulations, thousands of high-rise buildings, 10,000 miles of streets, five million cars, nearly non-stop traffic congestion, visible extremes of wealth and poverty and inevitable crime.
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