Ribeirão Preto is a municipality and city in the state of São Paulo in Brazil. It's nicknamed Brazilian California, because of a combination of an economy based on agrobusiness plus high technology, wealth and sunny weather all year long. With a little more than 500,000 inhabitants, Ribeirão Preto is the fourth largest municipality in the state, after the capital city, São Paulo, Campinas and Santos. With a total area of 652,2 km², its localization is 21º 10’ 42" South e 47º 48’ 24" West; and it is situated at 289 km from the capital city and at 516 km from Brasília, the federal capital. Mean altitude is 546,8 m. Ribeirão Preto is the center of an urban agglomeration with about 827 mil inhabitants, and comprised by the following municipalities:

• Barrinha
• Brodósqui
• Cravinhos
• Dumont
• Guatapará
• Jardinópolis
• Luiz Antônio
• Pradópolis
• Ribeirão Preto
• Santa Rita do Passa Quatro
• Santa Rosa do Viterbo
• São Simão
• Serra Azul
• Serrana
• Sertãozinho

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Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil (2000)
Area	652,2 km²
Altitude	546 m
Distance to capital	319 km
Demographic density	774,3 inhab/km²
Population (total)	509,423
Population (urban)	502,760
% urban population	99,57%
Average growth rate	1.84 %
% country population	0,3%
Average longevity (years)	74,4
Infant mortality	1,05 %
Illiteracy rate	5,2 %
Schooling rate (7-14)	96,4 %
Average annual income	US$ 2.398
Poverty	8,6 %
Human Development Index	0,855 (high) 19th national ranking

Contents

1 History 2 Culture 3 Education 4 Economy 5 Government 6 External links

History

The city was founded June 19, 1856, by farmers coming from the southeast of São Paulo State in search of good climate and soil for coffee growing. The city was laid by a stream called “Black Stream”, and was named after it (ribeirão preto means black stream in Portuguese). Eventually the farmers’ choice revealed itself as very adequate and the fertile soil of the Ribeirão Preto region allowed 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 adventurous people from several parts of the world. This movement was helped by the new Mogiana Railway, which linked Ribeirão Preto to São Paulo and to 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.

Culture

At the beginning of the 20th 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 (in honour of Brazilian opera composer Carlos Gomes - was demolished in 1949 but the other - the "Pedro II Theatre" (named in honor of Emperor Dom Pedro II), dating from the 1920s - resisted time and was restored and modernized during the 1990s. Its ceiling, completely destroyed in a fire of 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 more important of Brazil.

An important fact for the city life happened in 1911 with the opening of its first factory, the Antarctica Brewery Company. It was Antarctica which 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 Ribeirão Shopping respectively.

But Pinguim is not the only one good beer house in Ribeirão Preto. Ribeirão Preto is a hot climate city, which makes people like to go out of their houses in the evenings to chat and enjoy cold draught beers in bars. Therefore, the city is teemed with bars of different kinds 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.

Education

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 practical school. Several new buildings and houses for the professors were constructed over a land which held before 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 an 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 campus at Ribeirão Preto.

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) has been growing steadily and it is presently constituted by seven schools: School of Medicine of Ribeirão Preto (FMRP), School of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters (FFCLRP), School of Dentistry (FORP), School of Economics, Administration and Accounting (FEARP), School of Pharmaceutical Sciences (FCFRP), School of Nursing (EERP) and School of Music (DMRP-ECA).

The creation of USP-RP stimulated the cultural and academic life in Ribeirão Preto and several schools, colleges and universities were opened in the city since then. Today, besides USP-RP there are six other universities and faculties in the city.

Economy

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. Since the city is relatively far from other major Brazilian urban centers, it found a new economic vocation in the services and commercial sector, which was developed to attend the local and regional demands.

The second economic boom in the history of Ribeirão Preto occurred after the oil crisis of the 1970s. The increase in the oil price obliged Brazil to look for alternative means of fueling and the solution found was the alcohol fuel program, or Pro-Álcool as it is called. Pró-Álcool led to the development of a technology which allows 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 Pró-Álcool 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 placed the region as the largest alcohol and sugar producer of the world, being responsible for 30 percent of Brazil’s sugarcane alcohol fuel.

Contrary to what 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 products, textiles, machinery, steel, furniture, building materials, agrochemicals, pharmaceuticals and, of course, beer.

The sugarcane boom brought a new age of prosperity for the city, which was called the "Brazilian California" during the 1980s and early 1990s. On the one hand, this has 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 a new "Eldorado" atracted 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 like drug trafficking and high violence and crime rates, an unfortunate fact that Ribeirão Preto shares with all other major Brazilian cities.

Government

The mayor, Mr. Welson Gasparini (from the PSDB party coalition), was elected in October 2004 and took office on January 1, 2005. His term of office is four years. Mr. Gasparini is serving as a mayor for the third time.

External links

• Official website (http://www.ribeiraopreto.sp.gov.br) (in Portuguese).
• Local time and date (http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=601). TimeAndDate Worldclock.
• Local weather (http://www.weather.com/outlook/travel/businesstraveler/local/BRXX0198?lswa=WeatherLocalUndeclared&lswe=ribeir%C3%A3o%20preto&y=-15&x=9). Weather.com
• Hotels in Ribeirão Preto (http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotels-g303623-Ribeirao_Preto_State_of_Sao_Paulo-Hotels.html). TripAdvisor.pt:Ribeirão Preto