Elevado Presidente João Goulart (Minhocão)

This guide to the Minhocão in São Paulo starts with an 1846 legend: farmers describing a monster that burrowed through riverbanks and dragged cattle underwater, recorded by a French naturalist and later by a German one who heard it described as a giant earthworm. More than a century on, the city raised a two-mile elevated highway on stilts so close to apartment windows that people started calling it by the old creature's name, a nickname that outlasted two official ones, including a dictatorship-era general's. Best walked here in the evening, once the deck below has gone quiet.