Praia Grande, São Paulo, Southeast Region, Brazil

🇧🇷 Praia Grande is a municipality in the state of São Paulo in Brazil. It is part of the Metropolitan Region of Baixada Santista. Although the political emancipation is recent, the area covered today by the municipality of Praia Grande was one of the first areas colonised by the Portuguese, which began with the arrival of Martim Afonso in 1532. The first village founded by the explorer, sent by the Portuguese crown, was that of St. Vincent, which remained part Praia Grande until 1967. Praia Grande is divided into three districts: the Main/Seat District, Samaná, in the highlands, and Solemar, near the border with Mongaguá.

The neighbourhoods can be classified between coastal ones, which are located between the Padre Manoel da Nóbrega Highway and the beach, peripheral, located on the residential area between the highway and the Piaçabuçu river and its foothills, and the mountainous region of Samaná. Since 1992, each neighbourhood has been identified with a different colour, inserted in all public IDs for each district.

Also, some neighbourhoods are subdivided into smaller regions called Administrative Squares, which once made more specific addresses, helping the service of the local post office, currently serving to group places that have features common to the municipal administration work in some specific need.

The municipality contains part of the 901 hectares (2,230 acres) Xixová-Japuí State Park, created in 1993.

Infoway Praia Grande was the first Brazilian city to install the Information Highway, a fiber optic interconnection of all municipal government offices, which resulted in more than 300 km of cables installed in the main streets and avenues. With this network was also possible to install more than 1,200 video cameras along the busiest places of the city as well as in public buildings and monuments. The entire city is monitored by these cameras, a central, directly interconnected with the Municipal Guard and the Military Police. Thus, rates of police incidents fell 60% and vandalism of public facilities in the city by 40%.

Today, Praia Grande is the city with the largest number of surveillance cameras in the Americas, and the second in the world, second only to London, United Kingdom. There is a program of installation, the next two years (from 2007), 900 more cameras, overtaking even London in the amount of cameras installed.

In addition to monitoring, the Infoway allows data access to any unit of municipal institutions, in real time. This facilitates, for example, medical care, because even before the patient hold the first consultation, the doctor will have access to the entire history of every patient in the care of the municipal health network, including by which medical specialities which there have been consultations, tests, prescription drugs, allergies, and everything else that is part of history.