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Ribeir o Preto (Portuguese for "black stream") is a municipality and city in the state of S o Paulo in Brazil. It is nicknamed Brazilian California, because of a combination of an economy based on agrobusiness plus high technology, wealth and sunny weather all year ... more »
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Hotels Ribeirão Preto (Portuguese for "black stream") is a municipality and city in the state of São Paulo in Brazil. It is nicknamed Brazilian California, because of a combination of an economy based on agrobusiness plus high technology, wealth and sunny weather all year long. With 549,000 inhabitants, Ribeirão Preto is the ninth largest municipality in the state. With a total area of 652,2 km2, its latitude 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 thousand inhabitants.
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.
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, nowadays part of the AmBev group. 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. By the way, the Penguin beer house was named after the Antarctica company's logo.
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.
Ribeirão Preto has also one of the first micro-breweries in Brazil,Cervejaria Colorado, founded in 1997 produces three different types of beers, two ales and one lager.Cervejaria Colorado is located at Rua Minas 400 and has a bar at Avenida Independencia 3242 where it offers 70 different labels of beer from all over the world.
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 Creek”, and was named after it (ribeirão preto means black creek in Portuguese, sometimes the city name is mistranslated as Black Stream, also the name of a hotel in the city). 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.
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