São Paulo travel guide

Top 10 sights in São Paulo

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© Felipe Mostarda · CC BY 3.0

   Mirante do Vale

   A hundred and seventy metres of concrete finished in 1966, and the tallest building in São Paulo for fifty-six years. It stands over the Anhangabaú valley in the middle of the old centre, and its roof was opened to visitors before the newer towers were.

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2. 

   2© ProtoplasmaKid · CC BY-SA 4.0

   São Paulo Museum of Art

   Lina Bo Bardi's building of 1968, a glass box slung under four red concrete piers so that the ground beneath is left as a public plaza. Inside, the paintings hang on glass easels in the middle of the floor with nothing behind them — you meet a Van Gogh from either side.

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3. 

   3© F J Jarabeck · CC BY 2.0

   Edifício Altino Arantes

   An art deco tower of 1947 modelled on the Empire State Building, a hundred and sixty-one metres high, built as the headquarters of the state bank — Paulistanos still call it the Banespão. Its observation deck reopened to the public in 2018.

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4. 

   4

   Edifício Itália

   A hundred and sixty-five metres and forty-six floors, finished in 1965 for an Italian social club, and for years the tallest building in Brazil. The restaurant and terrace at the top are the standard place to look at the sheer extent of the city.

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5. 

   5© Fernando Stankuns · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Ibirapuera Park

   A hundred and fifty-eight hectares laid out for the city's four hundredth anniversary in 1954, with the buildings by Oscar Niemeyer and the planting by Roberto Burle Marx. Three museums, the Biennial pavilion and a lake sit inside it, and it is where São Paulo runs and cycles.

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6. 

   6© Geovana li malike · CC BY-SA 4.0

   São Paulo Cathedral

   A neo-Gothic cathedral begun in 1913 and finished in 1954, holding eight thousand people, with two towers of ninety-two metres. Its capitals are carved with Brazilian coffee, pineapples and armadillos instead of European foliage, and the crypt is open below.

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7. 

   7© Rhcastilhos · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Instituto Butantan

   A biomedical institute founded in 1901 that produces most of Brazil's antivenoms, along with much of its vaccine supply. A fire in 2010 destroyed its collection of some eighty thousand preserved snakes and spiders, one of the largest in the world, and it has been rebuilt since.

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8. 

   8© Wilfredor · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Pinacoteca de São Paulo

   The oldest museum in the city, founded in 1905, and rebuilt inside its own shell by Paulo Mendes da Rocha in 1998 — he stripped it back to brick and dropped steel walkways through the light wells. The collection is Brazilian art from the nineteenth century on.

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9. 

   9

   Museum of the Portuguese Language

   An interactive museum of the Portuguese language in Luz station, chosen because immigrants arriving from the port of Santos first heard the language on this platform. Fire gutted it in 2015; it reopened in 2021.

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10. 

    10© ProtoplasmaKid · CC BY 4.0

    Ipiranga Museum

    A palace of 1895 built beside the stream where Pedro I is said to have declared independence in 1822, now the history museum of São Paulo. It closed in 2013 as unsafe and reopened in 2022 after a rebuild, with Pedro Américo's enormous Independence or Death at the centre.

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1. 

   1

   Cracolândia

   A few blocks of the old centre where an open crack market has persisted for thirty years, through repeated police operations and repeated relocations. It is not a place to walk through, and the surrounding historic quarter is best approached from the other side.

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2. 

   2© Dornicke · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Monument to the Independence of Brazil

   A granite and bronze monument of 1922 in Independence Park, built for the centenary of the declaration made on this ground. Pedro I and his two empresses are buried in the crypt beneath it, brought from Portugal in 1972.

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3. 

   3© Ricardo630 · CC BY-SA 3.0

   São Paulo Brazil Temple

   A temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints dedicated in 1978, and the first the church built in South America — Brazil now has more members than any country except the United States. Its single spire is thirty-one metres.

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4. 

   4© Lukaaz · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Heliópolis

   The largest favela in São Paulo, with something like two hundred thousand residents in the Sacomã district. It began as a squatted settlement in the 1970s and has since been paved, plumbed and connected, which is what most Brazilian favelas are still waiting for.

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5. 

   5

   Obelisk of São Paulo

   An obelisk of seventy-two metres in Ibirapuera Park, the largest monument in the city, to the students killed in the constitutionalist revolt of 1932 — when São Paulo took up arms against Getúlio Vargas and lost. Four of them are buried under it.

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6. 

   6

   São Paulo Zoo

   The largest zoo in Brazil, on eighty-two hectares of surviving Atlantic forest in the south of the city, with the source of the Ipiranga stream inside it. It opened in 1958 and its walk-through forest paths are as much the point as the enclosures.

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7. 

   7© W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Monument to the Bandeiras

   A granite group fifty metres long at the entrance to Ibirapuera Park, finished in 1954, showing the bandeirantes hauling a canoe inland. Those expeditions opened the interior and enslaved the people in it, which is why the monument is periodically painted red by protesters.

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8. 

   8© Mauricio Maranhão · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Centro Histórico de São Paulo

   The ground on which Jesuits founded the town on 25 January 1554, at the Pátio do Colégio, and the old commercial centre until business moved to Paulista Avenue. It holds the cathedral, the market and the earliest street plan, and it has been slowly coming back.

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   9

   Praça da Sé

   The square in front of the cathedral, and the point from which every road distance in São Paulo is measured. A million and a half people filled it in 1984 demanding direct presidential elections, which is the largest political rally in Brazilian history.

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10. 

    10© Ana Paula Hirama · CC BY-SA 2.0

    Latin America Memorial

    Oscar Niemeyer's complex of 1989 on eighty-four thousand square metres, built to argue for Latin American integration, with a concrete hand on the plaza whose palm carries a map of the continent painted in red. A library, a gallery and an auditorium are behind it.

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