Luz Station

This guide to Luz Station in São Paulo traces the Victorian clock tower built in London in 1899 and the fifty meters of Scottish ironwork shipped piece by piece from Glasgow to build Brazil's grandest railway terminus. You'll hear how coffee money funded the line to the port of Santos, and how immigrants, Italians, Japanese, Lebanese, Syrian, Jewish, Polish, Lithuanian and Bolivian, stepped off under this same clock and gave the station its nickname, Brazil's Ellis Island. It also follows the 1946 fire that tested whether the tower's original mechanism would survive.