Ribeirão Preto


Ribeirão Preto, pop. 527,634 (2003), alt. 518 m (1,700 ft) Weather: Tropical with dry winter (Apr.-Sept.) and rainy summer (Oct.-Mar.) Temp. range: Winter: 12°C-30°C (54F-86F); Summer: 22°C-40°C (72F-104F) The city of Ribeirão Preto was founded June 19, 1856, by farmers coming from the southeast of of São Paulo State in search of good climate and soil for coffee growing. The city was laid out by a stream called “Black Stream”, and was named after it (ribeirão preto means black stream in Portuguese). Eventually the farmers’ choice revealed to be very adequate and the fertile soil of the Ribeirão Preto region provided the highest crop productivity in Brazil. The rapid development of the coffee cultivation brought wealth and progress to the city, which by the 1880s had become the largest coffee producer in the world. Coffee, the “green gold” as it was called, was responsible for a kind of “gold rush” in the region, which attracted workers and adventurers people from several parts of the world. This movement was helped by the new “Mogiana” railway, which linked Ribeirão Preto to São Paulo and the port city of Santos, and the abolition of slavery in Brazil, in 1888. The end of slavery created a strong demand for labor and the “coffee barons”, as the coffee farmers were called, stimulated European immigration - mostly from Italy but also from Portugal, Spain and Germany - to Ribeirão Preto. Later, after the stock market crash of 1929, several of these immigrants bought the farms from their indebted former employers. University of São Paulo
At the beginning of the XX Century and during its first three decades, Ribeirão Preto was a rich city boasting several mansions, European-style cafés, cabarets and even two opera houses. One of the opera houses - the Carlos Gomes Theatre - was demolished in 1949 but the other - the Pedro II Theatre, dating from the 1920s - resisted time and was restored and modernized during the 1990s. Its ceiling, completely destroyed by a fire in 1980, was rebuilt and gained a new design projected by the Japanese-Brazilian artist Tomie Ohtake. The Pedro II Theatre is now the third largest opera house in Brazil and is the home of the Ribeirão Preto Symphony Orchestra, one of the oldest and most important of Brazil. Antarctica Brewery Company. It was Antarctica that built the Pedro II Theatre. The Antarctica factory led to the opening of several beer houses in the city and one of them, Pinguim (penguin in Portuguese), became particularly famous and made Ribeirão Preto nationally renowned for the quality of its draught beer (chope or chopp in Brazilian Portuguese). Many people say that Pinguim has the best draught beer in Brazil and it became so important that it is now a symbol of the city; people say that coming to Ribeirão Preto and not visiting Pinguim is like going to Rome and not seeing the Pope. There are four Pinguim beer houses in Ribeirão Preto: two of them, called Pinguim 1 and 2 respectively, are at the November XV square (the central square of Ribeirão Preto) right beside the Pedro II Theatre. The other two are at the shopping centers Santa Úrsula and RibeirãoShopping.
Pedro II Theatre
But Pinguim is not the only one good beer house in Ribeirão Preto. As a result of the hot climate, people like to go out in the evenings to chat and enjoy cold draught beers in bars. Therefore, the city is teemed with different kinds of bars for different tastes, from the simple botequins or botecos that one can find in almost every corner to more sophisticated bars which rival with their counterparts in São Paulo or Rio. After the New York Stock Exchange crash of 1929 the economy of Ribeirão Preto, based on a single export crop, collapsed and the city had to adapt to a new situation. Relatively far from other major Brazilian urban centers, the city found a new economic vocation in the services and commercial sector, which was developed to attend the local and regional demands.
Pinguim
A noteworthy fact is that it was during the economic stagnation period from the 1940s to the 1950s that the city discovered and established its vocation as an educational and university center. In 1942, the state government expropriated the Monte Alegre Farm, which was an important coffee farm from the Schmidt family of German immigrants, to transform it into an agricultural school. Several new buildings and houses for the professors were constructed over a land which before had held tens of thousands of coffee plants. The new school was very well planned and urbanized and many trees were planted to provide shadow and give it a pleasant atmosphere. But the agricultural school never achieved a significant development and it was closed in 1951. A longstanding dream of the population of Ribeirão Preto was to have a university and, in 1952, the old farm was donated to the University of São Paulo for the creation of a medical school, which was the first school of its Ribeirão Preto campus.

Portinari	Portinari
Fortunately, many original buildings of the agricultural school and even some of the Monte Alegre Farm were preserved and only adapted to hold the new university, which makes its campus one of the most beautiful university campuses in Brazil. After the creation of the medical school, the University of São Paulo at Ribeirão Preto (USP-RP) grew steadily and it is presently constituted by seven schools: School of Medicine (FMRP), School of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters (FFCLRP), School of Dentistry (FORP), School of Economics, Administration and Accountancy (FEARP), School of Pharmaceutical Sciences (FCFRP), College of Nursing (EERP) and Music Department (DMRP-ECA). The creation of USP-RP stimulated the cultural and academic life in Ribeirão Preto and several schools, colleges and universities have been opened in the city since then. Today, besides USP-RP, there are six other universities and faculties. The second economic boom in the history of Ribeirão Preto occurred after the oil crisis of the 1970s. The increase in oil prices obliged Brazil to look for alternative means of fueling and the solution was the alcohol fuel program, or pro-alcohol as it is called. Pro-alcohol led to the development of a technology which allows for the use of ethanol (sugarcane alcohol) either as automotive fuel or as a gasoline additive. The latter improves performance and substitutes lead, thus decreasing polluting emissions. Due to the pro-alcohol program, farmers from the region of Ribeirão Preto were encouraged by government subsidies to grow sugarcane. The high productivity of the land around Ribeirão Preto rapidly turned the region into the largest alcohol and sugar producer in the world, being responsible for 30 percent of Brazil’s sugarcane alcohol fuel.
Curupira
As opposed to what had happened during the city's first economic boom, this time Ribeirão Preto farmers and enterpreneurs did not concentrate themselves exclusively on a single crop and diversified their investments, making the city one of the most important agribusiness centers of Brazil. Besides sugar and alcohol, Ribeirão Preto's major products are orange juice, cotton, rice, meat, dairy, textiles, machinery, steel, furniture, building materials, agrochemical and pharmaceutical products and, of course, beer. The sugarcane boom brought a new age of prosperity to the city, which was called the "Brazilian California" during the 1980s and early 1990s. On the one hand, this increased the city's wealth and turned it into a sophisticated center of services for Brazil and South America but, on the other hand, the image of "el dorado" attracted many migrants from impoverished areas of Brazil, leading to a rapid population growth and the appearance of slums (favelas as they are called in Brazil) with all the negative aspects associated to them, such as drug traffic and high violence and crime rates, an unfortunate fact Ribeirão Preto shares with all other major Brazilian cities .