After the São Paulo Marathon: Santos

The Route: São Paulo → Santos → São Paulo Logistics: Around 80 km, roughly 1.5 hours by coach, more when the escarpment roads are busy. Coaches leave from the Jabaquara terminal in the south of the city, at the end of Metro Line 1, which is the usual departure point; some services also run from Tietê, so check which terminal your ticket is from. Marathon Month: April Duration: Day trip

São Paulo (800 m) ──(≈1.5 hrs, down the Serra do Mar)──> Santos (sea level)
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                                        Centro Histórico ◄─────┴────► Beachfront gardens

São Paulo sits at 800 m on a plateau and the sea is 80 km away and straight down. The road drops off the Serra do Mar escarpment through rainforest on a series of viaducts, which is the best part of the journey, and comes out at the largest port in Latin America. Santos is a working city with a beach attached, and it is not a Caribbean proposition. It is a good day out.

April is autumn here and the water is still warm, with the summer holiday crowds gone.

The Museu do Café

The coffee exchange building on Rua XV de Novembro opened in 1922, and every sack of Brazilian coffee exported for decades was priced in the room at the centre of it. That room survives: a circular trading floor under a stained-glass dome, with the tiered seating and the auctioneer's position intact. The building is now the Museu do Café, and it covers the trade that built both Santos and São Paulo, with a café at the front serving beans from single estates.

It is the single best thing in the city and takes about an hour.

The old centre and the tram

The streets around the museum are the nineteenth-century commercial centre, much of it restored, some of it not. A restored tram runs a free circuit around the historic quarter from Praça Mauá, taking about forty minutes, and it is the least demanding way to see it on tired legs. The Bolsa building, the cathedral and the old customs houses are all on the loop.

Monte Serrat, the hill behind the centre, has a funicular to a chapel and a view over the whole port and the bay.

The seafront

The beachfront runs about 7 km along the bay, and between the promenade and the road there is a continuous strip of planted garden, roughly 5.3 km long, which holds the Guinness record as the largest beachfront garden in the world. It is flat, shaded in stretches, and the obvious place to walk off a marathon at a very slow pace.

The Canal 6 and Canal 4 drainage channels cut across it at intervals: they are part of the early twentieth-century sanitation works that ended the yellow fever epidemics here, and they are how locals give directions.

The Museu Pelé, in a restored mansion in the old centre, covers the career he spent almost entirely at Santos FC, and the Vila Belmiro stadium is a short ride away.

Where to Stay and Eat

Where to stay: This works as a day trip. If you want to stay, the seafront at Gonzaga has the hotels and the shops.

Where to eat: Seafood along the seafront, and the restaurants around the old centre near the museum for lunch. Santos does a good bolinho de bacalhau and the beach kiosks do the rest.

Getting Back