In Brazil, the "land of tomorrow," Sáo Paulo is the city of today. Last week in Sáo Paulo, Brazil's second city, a filling-station attendant watched a convoy of new trucks rolling down the highway to Rio, straight through a blinding tropical storm. Said he, with matter-of-fact pride: "Paulistas don't stop for anything." High in his 27-story skyscraper, a businessman explained judiciously: "We are Brazil. Without us, what would there be?"
Sáo Paulo is the world's fastest-growing major city; since 1890, its population has shot from 65,000 to 2,250,000. Located squarely on the Tropic of Capricorn some 5,000 miles south and east of New York, it is the southern hemisphere's most dynamic community, the economic powerhouse of the vast republic of Brazil. A palm-studded metropolis, exuberantly expanding under the leadership of some of the world's hardest-working, toughest-trading enterprisers, it is a kind of tropical Chicago.
Sáo Paulo boasts the most impressive skyline anywhere outside the U.S. Land at its financial core, the bank-packed downtown Triangle, sells for as much as Wall Street real estate. Modern buildings are pulled down to make way for bigger skyscrapers. On the average, a new building is finished every 50 minutes the year round. Air traffic is greater than that of London Airport. Though broad boulevards have been hacked through the city to channel the swelling flow of workers and shoppers, traffic congestion gets worse & worse. Sáo Paulo has 15,000 industrial plants and millionaires' mansions such as the U.S. has not seen since the days of Carnegie and Frick. It has burgeoning suburbs of bougainvillea-clad bungalows for the new middle classes, and white-collar workers' cottages along streets that peter out into raw slashes in the red earth.
The Way West. The key to such phenomenal expansion is the individual and collective drive of the Paulistas, who since they built their city on a broad shelf nearly 3,000 ft. above sea level, escape the enervating climate of the tropical lowlands. Drawn by good land and climate, nearly 1,000,000 European immigrants, mainly Italian, surged into Sáo Paulo state at the turn of the century, just when the city was ready to get up & go. Out of the melting pot of older Brazilians, Italians, Portuguese, Spaniards, Germans, Levantines and Japanese emerged the Paulista, cockily claiming a spiritual relationship with the swashbuckling bandeirantes (flag bearers) who founded Sáo Paulo in 1554. Those hardy adventurers roamed so deep into the backlands, enslaving Indians for coastal sugar planters, that they broke the Pope's line dividing the New World between Portugal and Spain, and carved out half the continent for what is now Brazil.
The modern bandeirantes began to roll in 1867, when the British built a railroad up the beetling cliffs between Sáo Paulo and the port of Santos. A coffee boom followed, and for 50 years or so, coffee was the life blood of Sáo Paulo. The state of Sáo Paulo still has more than a billion coffee trees, one-fourth of the world's total, but its coffee land is playing out; the nearest big plantation is now two hours' drive from the capital.