Vila Madalena

This guide to Vila Madalena in São Paulo starts at the bar Ó do Borogodó, a back-alley venue that spent twenty years pouring cheap beer and free samba, then had to crowdfund just to survive its own rent. It traces the neighborhood back to cheap farmland lots cut up decades ago, the students and artists who moved in from the 1970s onward, and a single Batman stencil sprayed on a side-street wall in the 1980s that grew into what's now called Beco do Batman. Best explored slowly on foot, tracing the alley's murals from one end to the other.