Sorocaba

Sorocaba is a municipality in the interior of the state of São Paulo, Brazil, with more than 723,000 inhabitants, which makes it the seventh largest city of the state and the second largest outside the Greater São Paulo region, behind only Campinas. It forms its own Metropolitan Region of Sorocaba, made up of 27 municipalities and about 2 million people. The bandeirante Baltasar Fernandes laid the foundation of the town in 1654, after the governor-general Dom Francisco de Sousa had earlier placed a pillory there in the belief that gold could be found in the region. The municipality has a surface area of about 450 square kilometres and an average altitude of 632 metres above sea level, on the boundary between the Atlantic Plateau and the sedimentary basin of the Paraná. Its climate is classed as Cwa in the Köppen system, a warm climate with summer rainfall. Sorocaba is a reference centre for health care, and its Faculty of Medicine, founded in 1950, was the first medical school in the interior of Brazil.