Baby Rio

With beautiful beaches and excellent seafood, Santos is a welcome antidote to the hustle of São Paulo

An easy escape

On an island tucked into the coastline, Santos makes for a delightful antidote to the noise and bustle of São Paulo, only 70km away. The food is tasty, the beaches beautiful but not flashy and the provincial curiosities add some welcome charm. Santos is like a small Rio de Janeiro, but without the hype (or the landmarks).

The hour-long journey south from São Paulo is a beautiful descent from the high plains, with spectacular coastal views through the Serra do Mar hills and Atlantic rainforest. It is best to hire a car and driver: expect to pay about 200 reais ($90), plus tolls.

The early port

Declared a "vila" (town) in 1546 by Brás Cubas, a Portuguese settler, Santos prospered as a gateway to the riches of Brazil's interior. But its deep-water port made it a target of French, Dutch and English attacks. Sir Thomas Cavendish, an English explorer-adventurer, sacked the town on Christmas Day in 1591, before the Portuguese consolidated their control in the 18th century.

Brazil gained independence in 1825, and few remnants of the colonial period exist. You may have to make do with historical paintings around town by Benedito Calixto (1853-1927), a local artist, which capture the baroque churches and vibrant port of the old settlement.

Bonde jumping

Successive generations placed their architectural stamp on Santos, often disregarding what came before. Concrete dominates the town now, so it is worth visiting the architectural riches of the city centre. A 15-minute ride on an old-fashioned electric tram, or bonde (pronounced "bongee"), starts in the Praça Mauá and wends along cobbled streets, past decaying colonial structures, various restored buildings and a striking blue-and-white-tile façade from 1865.

The bonde travels Rua XV de Novembro-a slight and charmingly anachronistic street-to reach the former Coffee Exchange. Completed in 1922, the building is a grandiose hodgepodge of architectural styles. Further on is a railway terminus from 1867, built by the British to transport Brazil’s coffee crop from the interior. This railway station successfully fuelled Santos’s economy from the mid-19th century until the second world war.

The Coffee Exchange is now a museum (website) dedicated to the story of Brazilian coffee. The bewitching smell of roasted beans from the ground-floor café fills the building's marble trading floor, which sits beneath a vaulted stained-glass ceiling. Three Calixto paintings here show Santos through the ages: at its founding in 1546, again in 1822 and then a century later.

The main event

Santos's main attraction is its waterfront. The port is the busiest in South America, with 14km of docks spread along inland channels. In 2006 more than 76 billion tonnes of goods are expected to pass through, up from 50 billion in 2001. There is a port museum amid the container stacks, but day-trippers will prefer the part facing the ocean.

The best fish restaurant in Santos is Mar del Plata, an unpretentious spot at the eastern end of the waterfront. It overlooks the port's entrance, affording views of huge, gliding container ships. Diners can feast on the catch of the day, grilled with a large prawn on top (a half-portion generally serves two). Further west, past the Fish Museum-the Museu do Pesce, which boasts an impressive array of stuffed fish, a whale skeleton and nearly 1,000 Brazilian sand samples-are the beaches. They start at Canal 7, the easternmost of a series of urban channels built in 1907 to improve sanitation and reduce flooding.

Boats take visitors through the canals, but the tunnels are claustrophobic and dank. It is far better to cruise on a schooner around the bay or to enjoy the fine gardens that run parallel to the shore; at 5.3km these are apparently the longest beachside gardens in the world. A bicycle path snakes beside the band of tropical green, and there is no shortage of places to get a drink in the area. (Bikes can be rented for 5 reais an hour from Beach Bike, 53 Av Bartolomeu de Gusmão, tel: +55 (0)13 3272-1608.)

The Fundação Pinacoteca Benedicto Calixto, a museum dedicated to Calixto's works, is sandwiched between high-rise flats near Canal 5. Raised in 1881 and restored in 1992, this elegant building is a lone reminder of the coffee-baron mansions that once graced the waterfront. Expect to find quite a few coastal landscapes (Calixto's best work), along with some historical paintings.