Almost three quarters of
Brazilians live in cities
By Dr Paulo Bótas

Brazil has 22 towns and cities with more than half a million people. Some of them have many more. Some 15.2 million people live in the urban area around and including the city of São Paulo. For Rio de Janeiro, the figure is 9.6 million. Of Brazil's 155 million people, 115 million live in cities. Some 67 million Brazilians live in the country's 100 largest cities.

As recently as 40 years ago, less than half the population lived in cities. Today, three-quarters do. Brazil has changed from being a mainly rural society into a mainly urban one. The growth of the cities has put enormous pressure on housing and public services like water supply, sewerage, health care and education. Today the situation is much different. The number of permanent houses is growing rapidly in urban areas. Even so, for many of the newcomers and young people growing up in the cities, it is difficult to find somewhere to live. They cannot afford to buy or rent permanent housing, so they often resort to living in shanty towns called ‘favelas’. Shanty towns are common in other industrialising countries of the world where people are moving to cities in search of better living.

Houses in the favelas are often built of cheap materials and have no running water or proper sanitation. Some are built on land near the city centre which no-one else wants - such as steep hillsides or marshes. Others may be on the outskirts of the city where land prices are low but where the cost of travel to jobs in the city centre are high. After a while, the favelas develop into whole communities and in some places government-supported housing schemes replace the shacks with simple but better built houses.

In 1995 there were nearly 3,500 favelas in Brazil. Two-thirds of them were in and around Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The favelas in Rio and outskirts contained 235,000 homes; around São Paulo the figure was 207,000.

Most of Brazil’s cities with populations of more than half a million people are located in the south and south-east of the country. The rest are strung out along the coast and only a few are inland. Several of the big coastal cities were founded when Brazil was first settled by the Portuguese in the 1500s. As time went by, these early settlements became ports for the export of products like sugar and coffee from nearby regions. They also became capitals of the states which developed around them. For instance, Salvador, the third biggest city, is the capital of the State of Bahia - in fact it was capital of the whole country for almost 200 years until 1763.

The inland cities developed as service centres for agriculture or industry. Curitiba, the capital of the State of Paraná, is the commercial centre for a rich agricultural region. Its factories process farm products. Manaus in the State of Amazonas stands where the rivers Negro and Solimões meet to form the Amazon, so it has always been a river port. It grew into a wealthy city at the end of the nineteenth century as the centre of the trade in natural rubber. That has now finished, but today Manaus has a free trade zone where hundreds of factories have been built - they pay no taxes and the products they make can be flown out directly from the airport.

The city of São Paulo has over 11 million people. If all the outlying suburbs and favelas are included - in other words, the whole metropolitan area, the figure reaches over 15 million. São Paulo is now Brazil's biggest city - and one of the world's biggest. It has large numbers of people of Italian, Spanish, German, Russian and Japanese descent. Most people in Brazil are Roman Catholic. In São Paulo one-third of the people follow other religions.

In other ways too it is a city of contrasts. It has a large central business district with skyscraper offices, a vast industrial park, and expensive housing. In addition, there are working-class suburbs and favelas which form a ring round the city. Here as many as five million Paulistas live in poor housing conditions.

Rio de Janeiro is a coastal city with a magnificent harbour and beaches - including the famous Copacabana and Ipanema beaches. The city's situation, between the sea and a series of sharp granite peaks (the most famous is the "Sugarloaf" mountain) makes it one of the most easily recognised cities in the world. Its beautiful site, plus a lifestyle and warm climate, have made it an attractive destination for tourists. Up to the 1950s though, it was a more important financial and economic centre than São Paulo and until 1960 it was the capital of Brazil.

So Brazil has become an urbanised country in a very short time, largely because of the development of industry and commerce. But the extremely rapid growth of the cities has created housing and other social problems for many of the migrants from the countryside. Brazil will need continued prosperity in the future to help solve those problems.

Brasília, a specially designed city on an empty site, took Rio's place as the capital of Brazil in 1960. Brasília is 1,200 kilometres inland from Rio de Janeiro. It is much more central, nearer to the heart of the country. The move was symbolic of Brazil's wish to develop the resources of the interior. It was also a way of constructing a new magnet for growth away from the South East Region. However, being so new, Brasília is still only the eighth largest city. Source: Brazilian Embassy in London

Brazil's 100 largest cities