Guarulhos
A farming town transformed when Brazil's overwhelmed Congonhas airport needed a replacement. Now handles 60% of Brazil's international passengers and 41% of air cargo—but has no economic identity independent of the runway that created it.
Guarulhos exists because São Paulo's airport couldn't. By the 1950s, Congonhas Airport was overwhelmed, hemmed in by the city it served. Brazil spent two decades surveying 23 possible sites before choosing Guarulhos—a municipality of farms and small factories northeast of São Paulo—in the 1970s. Construction began in 1980. When the airport opened on 20 January 1985, it transformed a peripheral agricultural town into Latin America's primary international gateway. Every transformation that followed was a consequence of that single infrastructure decision.
The airport now handles over 40 million passengers annually—60% of Brazil's international passenger traffic and 41% of all air cargo imports and exports. Three terminals sprawl across the municipality. The logistics chain that feeds Brazil's export economy—automobiles, pharmaceuticals, electronics, agricultural commodities—passes through GRU before it reaches the world. Privatization in 2012, when the Invepar-ACSA consortium took a 20-year concession, pushed passengers from 30 million to 39 million within three years and increased international cargo market share from 33% to 41%.
Guarulhos the city grew around Guarulhos the airport. The population reached 1.35 million by 2025, making it São Paulo state's second-largest municipality. Warehousing, freight forwarding, ground transportation, and export-oriented manufacturing cluster within the airport's economic orbit. But the city that the airport created also suffers from the classic company-town vulnerability: when air traffic contracts—as it did during the pandemic—the entire local economy contracts with it. Guarulhos has no historical economic identity independent of GRU. It was farms before the runway, and it would be farms again without it.
The paradox of Guarulhos is that Brazil's most important gateway has almost no civic identity of its own. Tourists land here and leave immediately for São Paulo. Business travellers transit through without stopping. The city's economy is entirely derivative—built to serve a piece of infrastructure that itself exists to serve somewhere else.