Pinheiros River throughout time

The Pinheiros River is one of the most important watercourses in the city of São Paulo. Despite being dirty and smelly today, it played a strategic role in the displacement of the first populations from the São Paulo plateau.

Coming from the coast via an alternative route to reach the village of São Paulo de Piratininga, the Jesuits entered the current southern region of the city via the Rio Grande, which flowed into the Guarapiranga to form the Pinheiros river.

From this place, where the village of Santo Amaro was located, founded in 1560 by Anchieta, it was possible during the rainy season to reach the Tietê River by boat, enter the Tamanduateí, to land in the village of São Paulo.

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The banks of the Pinheiros, previously occupied by lush Atlantic forest where jeriva palm trees abounded - hence the river being called Jurubatuba by the Indians, "river of palm trees" - the farms replaced the original vegetation.

The Pinheiros River floodplain was a region of farms producing vegetables and fruits, consumed in the Santo Amaro region and exported even to São Paulo (at the time Santo Amaro was an independent municipality).

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The river was quite sinuous, flooding the adjacent floodplains during the rainy season, which began to be straightened in 1928 - a process that was only completed in the early 1950s.

From then on, the farms began to be expelled by the subdivisions of working-class neighborhoods and by the factories that were set up along the river, along with the Sorocabana Railway.

Pinheiros water, at the time still clean and relatively free of dirt, was an input widely used in the metallurgical and chemical industries, which were widespread in the region.

In the absence of environmental laws and controls, the river also became the destination for industrial effluents and domestic sewage, which, discharged into small streams that are still abundant in the region, ended up falling into the river.

Between the 1950s and 1980s, toxic substances of all types, heavy metals and effluent sludge, began to accumulate at the bottom of the river.

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In 1970, the banks of the Pinheiros River (Avenida das Nações Unidas) were built, completing the process of degradation of the region surrounding Pinheiros.

The water quality of the former Jurubatuba was strongly affected by this entire process. Part of the river's volume was pumped to the Billings dam, located in the São Bernardo region, whose water powered the Henry Borden hydroelectric plant, located at the top of the Santos mountain range.

The increasing pollution of Pinheiros meant that the operation had to be abandoned by the state in 1992. Even so, even today, according to data from SABESP, around 290 industries and 400,000 families throw their waste into the river.

‍Long-term state plan

Financing for the revitalization of the Pinheiros River aims to bring back minimum conditions for aquatic life and improve the environmental situation for those who frequent the banks and nearby areas, and started with João Doria, the clean-up of 25 kilometers of Pinheiros and later undertaken by governor Tarcísio de Freitas.

"The improvement is the result of 25 thousand new sewage connections that were made following the investigation of illegal connections", he states. In total, more than 650,000 calls were made "The river is alive. But, as an urban river, it doesn't have this functionality (swimming)."

The current management recognizes that the program was successful and promises to take the model to the 1,100 kilometers of Tietê. In March, the Secretary of Environment, Infrastructure and Logistics, Natália Resende, presented the project called Integra Tietê to Estadão. "We will continue Pinheiros' successful practices," she said at the time.

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Source: São Paulo velhos tempos and Exame magazine.