Pensão Olimpia in

Santos is a municipality in the São Paulo state of Brazil, founded in 1546 by the Portuguese nobleman Brás Cubas. It is partially located on the island of São Vicente, which harbors both the city of Santos and the city of São Vicente, and partially on the mainland. It is the main city in the metropolitan region of Baixada Santista. Santos has the biggest seaport in Latin America, which handled over 72 million tons in 2006. It has large industrial complexes and shipping centers, which handle a large portion of the world's coffee exports, as well as a number of other Brazilian exports including steel, oil, cars, oranges, bananas and cotton. The city is also home to the Coffee Museum, where, once, coffee prices were negotiated. There is also a football memorial, dedicated to the city's greatest players, which includes Pelé, who played for Santos Futebol Clube. Its beachfront garden, 5.335 mts in length, figures in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest beachfront garden in the world. The exportation of coffee from the Port of Santos gave rise to the city and mostly accounted for the wealth of the city at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Exportation and importation through its port have made it the modern city one finds today and turned it into the indispensable outlet for the production of the powerhouse that is São Paulo State. Adorning the landscape of the port city are the canals that are over a hundred years old. In 1899, Santos was the point of entry for the bubonic plague into Brazil. In 1924, it became the seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Santos. In October 2006, light crude oil was discovered off the coast in the Santos basin. Santos is about 79 km (49 mi) from the metropolis São Paulo, capital of the state São Paulo.