Japanese · Italian · Lebanese · Afro-Brazilian · The People Who Built São Paulo

São Paulo was built by immigrants. Between 1880 and 1930, more than two million people arrived in the state of São Paulo — from Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Germany, Spain, and across the Americas. They came to work on the coffee plantations and in the factories of a rapidly industrialising city, and they brought with them their languages, their food, their religions, and their ways of life. The result is one of the most culturally layered cities on Earth.

The Japanese community of Liberdade — the largest outside Japan — arrived from 1908 onwards, transforming a central neighbourhood into a living piece of Japanese culture that has persisted for more than a century. The Italian immigrants of Bixiga built trattorias and cantinas that still serve the same recipes their grandparents brought from Naples and Calabria. The Lebanese community gave São Paulo its extraordinary Middle Eastern food culture. And beneath all of it, the Afro-Brazilian foundations — the samba, the pagode, the cuisine, the spiritual traditions — that give the city its rhythm and its soul. São Paulo is not one city. It is many cities, layered on top of each other, all happening at once.