Farol Santander

This guide to Farol Santander in São Paulo opens with a question: whose name is actually on this tower today, and whose boast was it built to make in the first place. It goes back to 1939, when architect Plínio Botelho do Amaral set out to give the city its own Empire State Building for the Bank of the State of São Paulo, a bank founded in 1909, and follows the nearly eight years it took to finish construction. Fourteen elevators and nine hundred steps connect its thousand-plus windows. Take the elevator to the twenty-sixth-floor observation deck for the best sense of the scale involved.