São Carlos

São Carlos (Saint Charles, in English, Portuguese pronunciation: [sɐ̃w ˈkaʁlus]; named after Saint Charles Borromeo) is a Brazilian city and municipality in the interior of the state of São Paulo, 254 kilometers from the city of São Paulo. With a population of 266,427 inhabitants, it is the 13th largest city by population, and is almost in the center of the state of São Paulo. The municipality is formed by the headquarters and the districts of Água Vermelha, Bela Vista São-Carlense, Santa Eudóxia and Vila Nery.

The city is an important regional industrial center, with the economy based on industrial activities and farming, such as the production of sugar cane, oranges, milk, and chicken. Served by road and rail systems, São Carlos has a commercial unit of the Swiss multinational Leica Geosystems and production units of several multinational companies, including Volkswagen, Faber-Castell (the São Carlos subsidiary is the largest of the group in the world, producing 1.5 billion pencils per year), Electrolux, Tecumseh, Husqvarna, LATAM, Serasa Experian and Grupo Segurador BB-MAPFRE. Given local and, in some ways, regional needs, there is a network of commerce and services distributed in street stores, convenience stores and a mall of the Iguatemi network. In the field of research, besides the universities, two centers of technical development of Embrapa are present in the municipality. São Carlos is the first city in South America in numbers of doctors per inhabitant, according to a survey done since 2006 by UFSCar. In all, there are 1,700 PhDs, which represents one for every 135 inhabitants. In Brazil, the ratio is one PhD per 5423 inhabitants.