São Sebastião, São Paulo

São Sebastião ( Portuguese for Saint Sebastian) is a Brazilian municipality, located on the southeast coast of Brazil, in the state of São Paulo. The population in 2020 was 90,328, its density was 185/km² and the area is 403 km². The Tropic of Capricorn lies 25 km north. The municipality existed since 1636 and formed a part of the old hereditary captaincy of Santo Amaro.

The archipelago municipality of Ilhabela is located on the east coast of the city; the largest island of the archipelago is also called São Sebastião. Between the city and the island, there is the São Sebastião channel with 30 kilometres in length, and variable width (2 km being the shortest crossing). There is an oil terminal at the channel, owned by Transpetro, a subsidiary of Petrobrás.

The city is famous for its beaches, which makes it a popular tourism destination, especially for people from the state of São Paulo. Near the boundary with Bertioga, there is a small Guarani village managed by FUNAI. In 2024, it was elected by '' Time Out magazine'' as the third most underrated travel destination in the world.

History

Before the Portuguese first arrived, the area was inhabited by the Tupinambás to the north and the Tupiniquins to the south. Both tribes were separated by the Serra de Boiçucanga (''Boiçucanga Mountain range''), located 30 km south of the city centre. Both tribes disliked each other. When the French arrived in Brazil via the Guanabara Bay and confronted the Portuguese, the Tupiniquins united with the Portuguese and the Tupinambás, with the French. This battle between them was witnessed and recounted by Hans Staden.

The municipality was named after Saint Sebastian in honor of the day that the Américo Vespúcio expedition sailed through the channel between the city and Ilhabela – January 20, 1502.

The first Portuguese to settle there were Diogo de Unhate, Diogo Dias, João de Abreu, Gonçalo Pedroso and Francisco de Escobar Ortiz, just after the subdivision of Brazil into capitanias hereditárias. São Sebastião was part of the Captaincy of Santo Amaro. The area was first developed as an agriculture and fishing village. The agricultural activities transformed the village into a major sugar cane producer, which later helped the hamlet to earn its village status on March 16, 1636. To gain this status, though, the village had to build a church in honour of Saint Sebastian.

A few years after this, another hamlet developed just north of São Sebastião: São Francisco da Praia (''Saint Francis of the Beach''). In 1840, the hamlet took the first step to become independent: they asked it to become a freguesia. The request was eventually accepted in the same year, but the freguesia was disestablished in 1859 and re-joined to São Sebastião.

The city kept on basing its economy on the production of sugar cane, coffee, tobacco and fishing. The local port was widely used to load ships with gold from Minas Gerais during the 17th and 18th centuries. It was also used by pirates and smugglers.

When slavery was abolished, in 1888, and the railway linking São Paulo to the bigger Port of Santos was opened, the city's economy entered a period of crisis, and the population decreased. From that moment on, the city began to rely on subsistence agriculture and "handicraft fishing" (''Pesca Artesanal''), a type of fishing done entirely by hand from the fishing to consumption (in other words, no machinery is used, and most of the people who practice it do it for subsistence as well).

Until the 1960s, nothing much changed. However, in that decade, Petrobras built its oil terminal, attracting new employees and investments. The population growth of the city grew wider and faster. While the city centre kept developing, workers migrating from other parts of Brazil built their houses near the Serra do Mar, establishing the neighborhood of Topolândia, which now is home to the lower-class families.

São Sebastião became a tourist destination in the late 1980s, when the ''Rodovia Rio-Santos'' (a section of the BR-101