The interior of São Paulo is an informal term to describe the zone that covers the entire area of the state of São Paulo outside the Metropolitan Region and the coast of São Paulo. The interior stands out for having a very rich cultural set, including several unique accents different from those of the capital and the coast.
This area is densely industrialized and characterized by a large and diversified economy, being one of the richest regions in Latin America. About 1/4 of the interior's GDP is concentrated in the Metropolitan Region of Campinas, which is increasingly consolidating itself as the hub of the Brazilian automotive sector. The interior of São Paulo stands out for having a good infrastructure, becoming a pole of attraction for investments.
History
16th century – Beginning of the exploration of the territory When the Portuguese arrived, there were a variety of indigenous tribes in the interior of São Paulo, predominantly from the macro-Jê linguistic group, such as the Kayapo, Xavante, Kaingang and Puri, and also territories inhabited by Guarani people.
In the 1560s, shortly after the founding of the town of São Paulo de Piratininga, the Paulistas, mostly caboclos (children of Portuguese settlers with indigenous women), began to explore the countryside in search of precious metals or to fight indigenous people according to the principle of fair warfare. One of the first expeditions of the Paulistas dates back to 1562, when João Ramalho left for the Paraíba Valley to fight the Guarani people who had surrounded São Paulo a short time before. In the 1580s, settlers from the towns of Santos, São Vicente and São Paulo departed on expeditions against the Guarani people in the valleys of the Tietê and Paraíba do Sul rivers. In 1585, Captain Major Jerônimo Leitão personally led a mission to Paranaguá to fight the native after requests from other settlers. During the 1590s, several punitive expeditions into the countryside were organized in retaliation for indigenous attacks on settlers and catechized Indians around São Paulo. Despite the defensive nature of these raids in retaliation for indigenous attacks, settlers often used them to obtain slave labor.
From the end of the 1580s, but especially in the 1590s, in addition to the punitive expeditions, there was an increase in the search for precious metals in the interior of São Paulo and Brazil. In 1589, Afonso Sardinha and his son of the same name discovered iron ore in the Ipanema Hill, which led to the construction of the first iron foundry in Brazil. In the same place, the first settlement of the interior of São Paulo was founded under the name of Vila de Nossa Senhora de Monte Serrat, but it declined due to the lack of gold in the area, with its inhabitants being transferred to the Itavuvu region, where Sorocaba is today, in 1611, by order of the governor-general of Brazil D. Francisco de Sousa; this settlement was also short-lived. In 1596, the Portuguese João de Sousa Pereira, also known as Botafogo, set out from São Paulo with at least 25 white settlers and a large number of natives in search of gold and precious stones in the valley of the São Francisco River, passing through the Paraíba Valley on the way, and also fighting hostile natives in the region.
17th century – Settlement of the area and century of the bandeirantes In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the settlement of São Paulo territory, until then restricted to the coast and the Piratininga Plateau, expanded to the valleys of the Paraíba do Sul and Tietê rivers, which is probably related to the demand for new lands and bandeirantes.
In the first half of the 17th century, there was a large increase in the number of bandeirante expeditions. Sponsored by governor-general Francisco, the bandeirante André de Leão entered the Paraíba Valley in search of precious stones in the direction of the São Francisco River in 1601, followed a year later by another large expedition carried out by Nicolau Barreto, this time towards the mines of the Viceroyalty of Peru, down the Tietê River. Failing to find precious metals, Nicolau Barreto's expedition devastated the Paranapanema River Valley, enslaving around 2,000 indigenous people. Several other expeditions crossed the interior of São Paulo in this period, following the course of the Tietê River, such as those of Manuel Preto (1606), Belchior Dias Carneiro (1607), Martim Rodrigues Tenório de Aguiar (1608) and Antônio Raposo Tavares (1628). These expeditions had as their main objective the capture of indigenous people to enslave in the Spanish Jesuit missions in Guayrá, Paraguay and Siete Pueblos de las Misiones.
From the 1640s onwards, the decrease in the supply of Guarani natives led the São Paulo settlers to redirect their captivity expeditions towards the Paraíba Valley, contributing to the elevation of the settlements of Taubaté (1645), Guaratinguetá (1651) and Jacareí (1653) to the category of town; for the same reason, the settlements of Jundiaí (1656), Itu (1657) and Sorocaba (1661), in the west and northwest, were also promoted to the category of town. Based on a small agricultural economy and indigenous workforce, these villages supplied the expeditions that traveled through the area, as well as serving as a base for new missions. Despite being elevated to the category of town in the 1640s, these settlements arose years or even decades earlier: Taubaté was founded by the bandeirante Jacques Félix in 1639 with the construction of a chapel in honor of St. Francis of the Wounds; Félix also founded Guaratinguetá in 1630, with the construction of a chapel dedicated to Saint Anthony; Jacareí appeared in 1652 under the name of Nossa Senhora da Conceição do Paraíba, founded by Antônio Afonso; in the 1640s, Rafael de Oliveira settled where Jundiaí is today and his namesake son built a chapel in honor of Our Lady of the Exile in 1651; in 1610, Itu emerged with the construction of the chapel in honor of Our Lady of the Light by the bandeirante Domingos Fernandes (he also participated in the mission of Belchior Dias Carneiro, in 1607); and Sorocaba, which had already had two primitive settlements that did not succeed (Nossa Senhora de Monte Serrat and São Felipe do Itavuvu), was permanently founded with the construction of the chapel of Our Lady of the Bridge (today the monastery of São Bento), in 1654, by the bandeirante Baltasar Fernandes.
Still in the 17th century, the Paulistas also formed the settlements of Araçariguama (1605), Pindamonhangaba (1643 or 1672), São Roque (1657), Atibaia (1665) and Araritaguaba (today Porto Feliz, 1693).
In the second half of the 17th century, the focus of the expeditions was no longer the capture of indigenous people to enslave, but the search for precious stones in the interior of the colony, especially in the current territories of Goiás and Minas Gerais. Among the names of bandeirantes who searched for metals, the best known were Fernão Dias and Borba Gato.
18th century – Mining expeditions and economic changes Since the last decade of the 17th century, numerous expeditions left Taubaté mainly in the direction of the Mortes River in Minas Gerais, led by locals such as Tomé Portes del-Rei and his son-in-law Antônio Garcia da Cunha, discovering important gold deposits in the valley of this river in the early years of the 18th century, such as in the vicinity of Tiradentes (1702) and São João del-Rei (1704). To the west, using the Tietê River and starting from Porto Feliz, Moreira Cabral and Miguel Sutil discovered gold in the vicinity of Cuiabá between 1718 and 1722. Starting from São Paulo and passing through Jundiaí, the bandeirante Bartolomeu Bueno da Silva (son), known as Anhanguera, discovered gold in Goiás in 1725, forming, along the way, support centers that would become the settlements of Campinas, Mogi-Guaçu, Casa Branca, Batatais and Franca.
During the first half of the 18th century, slave labor still remained predominantly dependent on indigenous workforce, who came to be categorized as managed to circumvent legislation that increasingly restrained indigenous slavery. The complete transition from indigenous to African labor did not occur until the end of the century. Indigenous people worked on the cotton and other product farms, especially those that resupplied the expeditions to the interior of Brazil, as had already been done in the previous century. Porto Feliz, for example, served as a starting point for the monsoons to Mato Grosso, with natives also working in the manufacture of the canoes and in the transportation itself.
From the second half of the century, during the government of the Morgado de Mateus, there was an economic expansion of the captaincy of São Paulo with the introduction of sugar cane cultivation in the countryside, but without harming the diversified production of crops such as corn, beans and rice. New towns were founded, such as São José dos Campos (1767), which until then was an indigenous settlement; the villages of São Luiz do Paraitinga (1773), Cunha (1785) and Lorena (1788) were also elevated to the category of town in the Paraíba Valley. In the Jundiaí region, the parishes of Mogi Mirim (1769) and Atibaia (1769) ascended to the category of town, as well as Campinas (1774), which was raised to parish status, along with Bragança Paulista (1765) and Piracicaba (1767). In the southwest, in the Sorocaba region, Itapetininga (1770) and Itapeva (1769) were founded. Livestock was predominant in this region, with the transportation by mule between the cities of Sorocaba and Viamão, in Rio Grande do Sul, being of great importance for the towns and parishes on the way and causing the regular occurrence of the mule fairs of Sorocaba. In the region of Itu and Jundiaí, in addition to sugar production, the villages and towns served as supplies for the caravans that headed for Mato Grosso and Goiás on the roads opened at the beginning of the century. In the Paraíba Valley, besides sugar cane, the towns of the area supplied the mining region in the captaincy of Minas Gerais. At the end of the century, the "Quadrilátero do Açúcar" (English: Sugar Quadrilateral), an area delimited by the towns of Sorocaba, Piracicaba, Mogi Guaçu and Jundiaí, gained prominence due to the production of sugar for export.
Until the end of the 18th century, the common language spoken in the captaincy of São Paulo was Classical Tupi, known as paulista general, which was used in the day-to-day life of the predominantly mameluca population; this fact was noted by the Bishop of Olinda when he criticized the bandeirante Domingos Jorge Velho, who had been hired to put an end to Quilombo dos Palmares, claiming that he was basically a Tapuia native who did not even speak Portuguese. With the decree of the Marquis of Pombal in 1757 prohibiting its use, the paulista general language fell into disuse over time in favor of Portuguese, being spoken by the elders still in the 19th century and extinct only at the beginning of the 20th century. Despite this, its influence is still present today in the caipira dialect, which employs words of Tupi origin and also its phonetics.
19th century – The coffee cycle At the end of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century, with the decline of gold mining in Minas Gerais, many miners settled in northeastern São Paulo, where they developed farming and cattle raising. They founded settlements, which were the basis of important cities in the region, such as Ribeirão Preto, Barretos and São José do Rio Preto.