Many paulistanos are facing dry taps, yet there is plenty of water to go around in São Paulo. In the second part of our series on the struggling megacity, we meet the urban explorer who knows all of its hidden rivers and springs

News of São Paulo’s water crisis has, by now, spread far and wide. But although the word “seca” (drought) is much in use, and though a severe lack of rain is one of the many factors in play, when it comes to actual shortage of water, the truth – as with almost everything else in this sprawling metropolis – is that it’s complicated.

There’s a wealth of water in São Paulo: it’s just not always in the right places. As if to drive the point home, the late-afternoon rain that drenches the city most days in summer has been rare this year; yet during one recent, torrential storm, half the rain expected for the entire month of February fell in the space of just a few hours.

When the storm hit downtown São Paulo, the bus terminal at Praça Pedro Lessa, in the Valley of Anhangabaú, was quickly awash, shin-deep in water in a matter of minutes. Gushing down the hill towards it along Rua Capitão Salomão, a fast-moving current of water sent a fleet of black rubbish bags sailing down the street, straight into the back of the suddenly motionless traffic.

São Paulo – anatomy of a failing megacity: residents struggle as water taps run dry Read more

For some of those looking glumly from the windows of stationary buses, flooded streets awaited at home; or worse still, soaked sofas, ruined fridges, and kitchen floors slick with mud. In this chronically built-up subtropical city, high-velocity runoff from the essentially impermeable surface drives storm canals to dangerous, fast-moving levels, and causes flash flooding and even landslides in some neighbourhoods, even as millions grapple with the daily problem of limited or non-existent water supplies.

Water, unsurprisingly, is a topic of ceaseless discussion, and the source of considerable collective anxiety. And for some, including a handful of well-informed amateur water-watchers, it has become a life-altering obsession.

In adventures he chronicles on his Facebook page, Existe Água em SP (“There is Water in SP”), the river hunter Adriano Sampaio is a tireless urban expeditionist, walking the city in search of lost rivers and springs, and posting a steady stream of videos to his page. He and his friend Ramon Bonzi, an urbanist, use 1930s maps laid over modern-day street maps to track down hidden and forgotten waterways, peering over walls, lifting manhole covers and climbing about in the undergrowth in search of rivers, streams and springs. “We always find something,” says Sampaio.

Wearing his trademark Panama hat, he ranges from the city’s affluent centre-west to its immense eastern expanses – in a recent post filmed in the working-class neighbourhood of Cidade Antonio Estevão de Carvalho, he shows residents fishing in a community-created lake, and reports on overgrown, neglected streams and on raw sewage infiltrating the waterways, “straight from the public sewerage system”.

On one expedition to Pirituba in the north of the city, Sampaio drank from a spring the community uses for drinking water, and became so ill that he ended up in hospital. “It’s vital that the different springs and water sources around the city are tested and labelled,” he says, “so that people know what use each source can safely be put to.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Rios e Ruas project has mapped São Paulo’s 3,000km of buried rivers and streams. Photograph: mapascoletivos

A self-confessed passionate amateur, Sampaio’s work follows in the expert footsteps of the project Rios e Ruas (Rivers and Roads), created by geographer and water systems specialist Luiz de Campos and José Bueno, an architect. They have been mapping the city’s waterways since 2010, and also organise expeditions and weekend taskforces, bringing teams of volunteers together to clean up neglected rivers and streams.



São Paulo has nearly 300 named waterways, says de Campos, and probably closer to 500 in total. A collective map used by Rios e Ruas shows the city looking like a vital organ, encased in a blue web of waterways – a network of mostly buried rivers and streams totalling more than 3,000 km. “There’s plenty of water in São Paulo,” says de Campos. “It’s just very badly managed.”

Sampaio, a lifelong nature-lover, was first inspired to action in 2013, after a chance discovery he made while walking in a small park, Praça Homero Silva, close to where he grew up in the neighbourhood of Pompéia. “I noticed that the ground was muddy, and I started digging,” he recalls.

Within minutes, water began seeping from the earth. Sampaio dug another hole, and another, and as water sprang from the ground, he was hooked. Setting to work to channel the water from the various springs he uncovered in the park, he quietly created a small pond, without permission, at the bottom of the park; and in July 2014, with the help of friends and supporters, a second pond, right beside the first. “We only used materials we found in the area,” he says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The ponds Sampaio and his friends created are now brimming with fish. Photograph: Christian Tragni

The ponds took several months to fill up, but today, they are brimming with plant life in and around the water, and teeming with fish – around 10 species introduced by Sampaio, including fat tilapia and carp, peixe cascudo, peixe vidro, paulistinha, espadinha and tiny guarú (the latter excellent for eating mosquitos and their larvae, and thus combating the spread of dengue fever, which is on the rise in the city as a result of millions of litres of hoarded water). The ponds attract all manner of birds, and they also attract people: “People were a little wary of coming through the park before,” says Sampaio.



The park’s abundance of water comes as no surprise to its neighbours, many of whom have had springs in their back yards for generations. In a simple house whose back wall borders the park, metres from the fishponds, Eli Maria Jose Salis and her family have enjoyed a steady supply of spring water, run in from the park in a pipe that leads to a second water tank, for more than 30 years.

Do they need it to top up the water supply they get from SABESP (the city’s privatised water board)? “No, we get plenty of water,” says Salis. “It’s not that. It’s just that we have all this water, and it wouldn’t be right to waste it.” SABESP, meanwhile, loses more than 30% of the treated drinking water in its distribution network as a result of massive leakage from badly deteriorated pipes, as well as theft and clandestine connections.

SABESP, like Existe Água em SP and Rios e Ruas, is also on the hunt for rivers. In a series of urgent “mega-projects” aimed at making up the shortfall in São Paulo’s water supply, it is working on a project to reverse the course of the River São Lourenço, and to siphon millions of gallons of water from the Rivers Paraíba do Sul, Guaió, Juquiá and Itatinga, piping the water to the city of São Paulo’s Alto Tietê and Cantareira reservoir systems. State governor Geraldo Alckmin is hoping the measures will banish the spectre of a draconian two-day-on/five-day-off water rationing regime that is still on the cards, if reservoirs have not recovered sufficiently by the start of the dry season in April.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Many residents were wary of coming through Homero Silva park before the ponds were created. Photograph: Christian Tragni

“The authorities only seem able to conceive of massive construction works, costing billions,” says Sampaio. “But they’re not even guaranteed to work – many of those rivers are extremely low on water too.”

Sampaio gave up his job as an insurance salesman last year, after 20 years, to devote himself to environmental activism full-time. As we stand on a piece of wasteland above the park, taking in the view across Pompéia, he expounds on the urgent need for reforestation, and on the subject of “linear parks” alongside rivers and streams, which create lakes, ponds and bodies of water capable of retaining stormwater and rainwater, as well as places for people to sit, walk and cycle in peace.



“I want to help remind people what rivers and streams are, what springs are,” he says. “We seem to have forgotten that we’re part of nature,” he says, “but the fact is that we’re surrounded by it, even when we can’t see it.”

Sampaio spots a couple of guavas on a spindly tree and picks them, and we bite into their tight green skin, crunching through to the pink flesh and seeds inside. It makes no sense to allow useful water to simply drain away, he says. It shouldn’t be a difficult matter, he says, for the city to begin to classify, store and use some of its underground water, even if not for drinking, then for hundreds of other uses. For now, many people are taking the matter into their own hands, and making use of what water they can.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Homero Silva park. Photograph: Christian Tragni

The brimming water table on which São Paulo sits makes its existence plain in the gutters of countless city streets, gushing down channels so well traversed that some of the kerbstones are bright green with moss. At a rate of as much as 5,000 litres an hour, the clear water, mostly of reasonable quality, is ceaselessly pumped from the bowels of buildings whose foundations have perforated the water table, often as a result of subterranean car parks.

With the shortage now in full effect, some of that water is now being captured by private citizens and residents for use in sluicing floors, watering plants and washing cars. Most, however, is channelled straight into the wastewater system, where it mixes with sewage before finding its way into the Pinheiros and the Tietê – two interconnected, heavily polluted rivers that slink sadly through the city, trapped between 12 lanes of traffic on the the Marginal ringroad.

The Pinheiros, once an exuberantly curved, classically serpentine plains river, has been channelled into long straight stretches since the 1940s, and to this day, receives discharges of raw sewage at various points along its sluggish, fetid trajectory – including, according to De Campos, from the chic Cidade Jardim shopping centre. There is no provision, he says, for wastewater treatment along that entire stretch of the river’s left bank.

“People like to lament that the rivers are polluted as if it were a fait accompli,” he says. “But it’s not the way it works. The problem is that we’re polluting them now.” According to De Campos, cleaning up the waterways, including the moribund Pinheiros and the Tietê, is far simpler than it might seem: stop polluting them, starting with the streams. “Rivers are more than capable of cleaning themselves,” he says, “if we just give them the chance.”