City Mayors: Largest Brazilian cities (original) (raw)

City Mayors ranks the world’s largest and richest cities and urban areas. It also ranks the cities in individual countries, and provides a list of the capital cities of some 200 sovereign countries

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Almost three quarters of

Brazilians live in citiesBy 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

Rank	Cities	Population
1	Sao Paulo	10,009,000
2	Rio de Janeiro	5,613,000
3	Salvador	2,331,000
4	Belo Horizonte	2,154,000
5	Fortaleza	2,139,000
6	BRASILIA	2,016,000
7	Curitiba	1,618,000
8	Recife	1,388,000
9	Porto Alegre	1,321,000
10	Manaus	1,285,000
11	Belém	1,200,000
12	Guarulhos	1,134,000
13	Goiânia	1,073,000
14	Campinas	962,000
15	Sao Gonçalo	880,000
16	Nova Iguaçu	873,000
17	Sao Luís	855,000
18	Maceió	806,000
19	Duque de Caxias	756,000
20	Sao Bernardo do Campo	742,000
21	Teresina	703,000
22	Natal	699,000
23	Osasco	671,000
24	Campo Grande	665,000
25	Santo André	631,000
26	Joao Pessoa	594,000
27	Jaboatao dos Guarapes	567,000
28	Contagem	529,000
29	Sao José dos Campos	524,000
30	Uberlândia	502,000
31	Feira de Santana	489,000
32	Ribeirao Prêto	478,000
33	Sorocaba	477,000
34	Niterói	462,000
35	Cuiabá	460,000
36	Juiz de Fora	458,000
37	Aracaju	451,000
38	Sao Joao de Meriti	441,000
39	Londrina	438,000
40	Joinville	437,000
41	Belford Roxo	433,000
42	Ananindeua	419,000
43	Santos	407,000
44	Campos dos Goytacazes	401,000
45	Mauá	385,000
46	Carapicuíba	366,000
47	Sao José do Rio Prêto	360,000
48	Caxias do Sul	357,000
49	Olinda	356,000
50	Campina Grande	356,000
51	Moji das Cruzes	347,000
52	Aparecida de Goiania	343,000
53	Diadema	338,000
54	Vila Velha	325,000
55	Piracicaba	324,000
56	Cariacica	324,000
57	Bauru	320,000
58	Pelotas	318,000
59	Betim	318,000
60	Porto Velho	314,000
61	Serra	312,000
62	Franca	297,000
63	Canoas	297,000
64	Jundiaí	296,000
65	Maringá	292,000
66	Montes Claros	290,000
67	Sao Vicente	289,000
68	Anápolis	287,000
69	Florianópolis	285,000
70	Itaquaquecetuba	284,000
71	Petrópolis	282,000
72	Ponta Grossa	272,000
73	Vitória	272,000
74	Rio Branco	269,000
75	Foz do Iguaçu	268,000
76	Macapá	267,000
77	Ilhéus	258,000
78	Vitória da Conquista	257,000
79	Uberaba	254,000
80	Paulista	253,000
81	Limeira	250,000
82	Blumenou	248,000
83	Caruaru	248,000
84	Caucaia	248,000
85	Nôvo Hamburgo	244,000
86	Ribeirao das Neves	243,000
87	Cascavel	243,000
88	Volta Redonda	242,000
89	Santa Maria	242,000
90	Santarém	241,000
91	Guarujá	240,000
92	Taubaté	231,000
93	Governador Valadares	231,000
94	Embu	230,000
95	Gravatai	228,000
96	Imperatriz	224,000
97	Varzea Grande	221,000
98	Barueri	218,000
99	Mossoró	217,000
100	Petrolina	216,000