Avenida Paulista, Liberdade and Jardins in Brazil

Liberdade was the first centre for the Japanese community in São Paulo; a city with more ethnic Japanese than any outside Japan. It lies directly south of the Praça da Sé but can easily be reached on foot. There are all manner of Asian shops selling everything from woks to

and the streets are illuminated by lights designed like Japanese lanterns. A market selling Asian produce and food is held every Sunday in the Praça da Liberdade and there are many excellent Japanese restaurants.

The

, www.nihonsite.com/muse, in the Japanese-Brazilian cultural centre is a modern, well-kept little museum with exhibitions telling the story of the Japanese migration to Brazil, including reconstructions of early Japanese Brazilian houses, artefacts and information panels. All are in Portuguese.

Southwest of the Centro Histórico,

, is lined by skyscrapers and is thick with six lanes of cars. It is one of São Paulo's classic postcard shots and locals like to compare it to Fifth Avenue in New York. In truth, it's more commercial and lined with functional buildings, most of which are unremarkable individually and awe-inspiring as a whole.

The highlight of Avenida Paulista is the

(

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, www.masp.uol.com.br

or a Velazquez at their leisure. France gets star-billing, with 11 Renoirs, 70 Degas, and a stream of works by Monet, Manet, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin.

Renaissance Italy is represented by a Raphael Resurrection, an impeccable Bellini and a series of exquisite late 15th-century icons. The remaining walls are adorned with paintings by Bosche, Goya, Van Dyck, Turner, Constable and many others, cherry-picked from post-War Europe.

On Sunday, an antiques fair is held in the open space beneath the museum. Opposite MASP is the

. Next to the park is the smaller Praça Alexandre de Gusmão.

Consolação, off the northeastern end of Avenida Paulista, is emerging as the edgiest and most exciting nocturnal neighbourhood in São Paulo. Until a few years it was home to little more than rats, sleazy strip bars, street-walkers and curb-crawlers, but now it harbours a thriving alternative weekend scene. Its untidy streets are lined with grafitti-scrawled shop fronts, the deep velvet-red of open bar doors, go-go clubs with heavy-set bouncers outside and makeshift street bars. On Fridays and Saturdays from 2200 a jostle of hundreds of young Paulistanos down bottles of cooler-fresh Bohemia beer at rickety metal tables. And lines of sharply dressed and well-toned 20- and 30-somethings queue to enter a gamut of fashionable bars, clubs and pounding gay venues, including one of Brazil's most exciting underground venues: