Things to do
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Mercado Municipal
A hall of 1933 from the Ramos de Azevedo office, lit through stained glass that shows planting and harvest rather than saints. The floor is stacked with Amazonian fruit, salt cod and cheese, and the upper gallery looks down the length of it.
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Museu de Arte
Lina Bo Bardi lifted the galleries off Avenida Paulista on four red beams in 1968 and left the ground beneath as a public square. The collection hangs on glass easels in one open room, so every painting is met from the front and the back at once.
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Parque Ibirapuera
The city's central park, opened for the fourth centenary in 1954, with Oscar Niemeyer's white marquee threading the pavilions together around a lake. The Museu Afro Brasil and the Museum of Modern Art both stand inside the grounds.
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Pinacoteca de São Paulo
The state art collection fills a brick building of 1900 that Paulo Mendes da Rocha reworked in 1998, glazing the courtyards and leaving the raw walls exposed. It is the clearest survey anywhere of Brazilian art from the nineteenth century on.
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Beco do Batman
An alley of garage doors and house walls in Vila Madalena, painted continuously since a Batman figure appeared on it in the 1980s. The work is redone often enough that the street is a different street from one season to the next.
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Edifício Copan
Oscar Niemeyer's concrete S curve in the old centre, finished in 1966 across six blocks holding 1,160 apartments and around five thousand residents. It has its own postcode, and guided visits go up to the roof.
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Edifício Martinelli
São Paulo's first skyscraper, finished in 1929 by an Italian immigrant who put his own house on the roof, and for a time the tallest building in Latin America. The top terrace is opened free by appointment over the Vale do Anhangabaú.
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Hotel Fasano
Isay Weinfeld and Marcio Kogan's building of 2003 on a private street in Jardins, in dark timber, travertine and brass, with 64 rooms and a pool on the roof. It is the hotel that reset what Brazilian luxury looked like.
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Liberdade
The quarter that absorbed Japanese migration from 1908 and now holds Chinese and Korean streets alongside it, hung with red lanterns down Rua Galvão Bueno. A street market fills the square by the metro at weekends.
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Museu do Futebol
Built into the terraces of the Pacaembu stadium in 2008, and less about trophies than about what football did to Brazilian life. Radio commentary, crowd noise and the lost final of 1950 carry more of it than the cabinets do.
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Rosewood São Paulo
The 2022 conversion of the Matarazzo maternity hospital, where half a million paulistanos were born, with Philippe Starck inside and Jean Nouvel's plant covered tower beside it. Some 450 commissioned works by Brazilian artists hang through it.