After the São Paulo Marathon: MASP and Avenida Paulista

The Route: Ibirapuera → Avenida Paulista → MASP → Parque Trianon Logistics: Around 2 km, 10 minutes by taxi, or Metro Line 2 to Trianon-MASP which comes up directly outside. Allow two hours in the museum. Marathon Month: April Duration: Half day

Ibirapuera ──(≈2 km, taxi or Metro Line 2)──> Trianon-MASP
                                                     │
                                            MASP  ◄──┴──►  Parque Trianon

Check the day first. MASP closes on Mondays, which is the day most runners have free after a Sunday marathon. Entry is free on Tuesdays and the museum stays open late one evening a week. If your only free day is the Monday, walk Ibirapuera instead and come here on the Tuesday morning before flying out.

The building

Lina Bo Bardi finished MASP in 1968, and the design still does something no other museum building does: the whole gallery block is lifted 8 m off the ground on four red concrete beams, with a 74 m clear span and nothing underneath it but an open civic terrace. She did that because the land had been given to the city on condition the view from Avenida Paulista down towards the valley stayed open. The space beneath the building is now used for a Sunday antiques market and for demonstrations, and it is the most generous piece of public space in central São Paulo.

Inside, Bo Bardi hung the paintings on freestanding glass easels set in concrete blocks, in an open room with no walls between periods or schools, so you walk among the pictures and can see the back of every one. That arrangement was dismantled in the 1990s and restored in 2015, and it is the reason to come even if you do not care for the collection.

The collection

Raphael, Bosch, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Goya, Van Gogh, Renoir, Cézanne, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, alongside the strongest holding of Brazilian art in the country, including Portinari and Anita Malfatti. It was assembled in the 1940s and 1950s by Assis Chateaubriand, who used the leverage of his newspaper empire to persuade Brazilian businessmen to pay for European pictures at a moment when the European market was cheap.

Two hours covers the main floor comfortably. The temporary exhibitions occupy the levels below.

Avenida Paulista

Paulista runs for 2.8 km along the ridge and is the financial spine of the city, flat end to end and lined with the towers that replaced the coffee mansions. On Sundays it closes to traffic entirely and fills with people, cyclists and musicians, though on marathon Sunday you will be elsewhere.

Parque Trianon, directly across the avenue from MASP, is a small block of preserved Atlantic forest with shaded paths, and it takes fifteen minutes to walk through. Two blocks further along, Casa das Rosas is a surviving 1935 mansion, now a poetry centre, with a garden and a café.

Where to Stay and Eat

Where to stay: The Paulista and Jardins blocks have the largest concentration of hotels in the city, and the Metro from here reaches Ibirapuera in minutes for race morning.

Where to eat: Jardins, immediately west of Paulista, has the serious restaurants. For lunch, the per-kilo buffets on the side streets off the avenue are a São Paulo institution: you fill a plate, it goes on a scale, you pay by weight. Rua Augusta, running down the hill from Paulista, has the bars.

Getting Home