Current local time in São Paulo

Annual daylight in São Paulo

Did You Know?

São Paulo Simply Flies Over the Problem

São Paulo operates the largest civil helicopter fleet on Earth — roughly 411 registered aircraft, ahead of New York, Tokyo and London. They move between more than 260 rooftop helipads, and at peak the city handles around 2,200 take-offs and landings a day. That is one rotor movement roughly every forty seconds.

The traffic beneath them is the explanation. In 2014 São Paulo set a record with a queue measuring 344 kilometres. From Alphaville on the outskirts to Avenida Paulista in the financial core takes about seven minutes by helicopter and up to two hours by car. Executives are not buying glamour. They are buying back an hour and fifty-three minutes.

The system got so dense that Brazil's Air Force built São Paulo a dedicated air traffic control service exclusively for helicopters — the only one of its kind in the world. There was a period around 2010 when a majority of the city's helipads weren't even registered with anybody.

The clock: in 2019 Brazil abolished daylight saving time. The official reasoning was that the savings had quietly evaporated: air conditioning had replaced lighting as the thing the country switched on, and air conditioning does not care what the clock says.

Combine that decision with geography and something counterintuitive falls out. São Paulo sits almost exactly on the Tropic of Capricorn, which caps its longest day of the year at roughly 13 hours 25 minutes. In January — the absolute peak of Brazilian summer — it is dark by around seven in the evening.

So a midsummer evening in the largest city in the southern hemisphere is finished before a June evening in London has properly got going. São Paulo has the climate for long summer nights and, since 2019, has formally declined to have any.