Bebedouro was formally founded on 3 May 1884, at the moment when coffee was remaking the interior of São Paulo. Coffee is a demanding crop and a lucrative one, and towns that grew on it grew fast — rail lines, warehouses, immigrant labour, money moving through in a hurry. What distinguishes Bebedouro is what happened when the coffee cycle passed. Plenty of Paulista towns simply shrank. This one changed crops. The groves that replaced the coffee were citrus, and the industry that grew around them — packing, processing, freezing concentrate for export — is still the basis of the municipal economy. Two commodities, a century apart, on the same red soil.

Northern São Paulo and neighbouring Minas Gerais form what the trade calls Brazil's citrus belt, and Bebedouro sits close to its geographic centre. Commercial citrus in São Paulo dates to 1869, but the transformation came with processing: from 1962 the state's juice industry scaled up, and Brazil became one of the world's dominant exporters of frozen concentrated orange juice. Growers here wanted science close at hand. In 1978 local citrus farmers, agronomists and members of the Rotary Club of Bebedouro founded an agroindustrial research foundation, and out of it came the Estação Experimental de Citricultura de Bebedouro, established in 1982 on the Brigadeiro Faria Lima highway. By 1995 the station was running 62 research projects in its orchards — rootstocks, varieties, and the diseases that periodically threaten every tree in the belt.

The city's social centre is a lake. Parque do Centenário occupies downtown ground around a broad body of water, and the surrounding blocks are known simply as the Região do Lago — the lake district. The park holds squares, sports courts and fields, and space set aside for walkers, runners and skaters, plus a sambódromo for carnival parades. Around its edges are bars, snack counters, restaurants, dance clubs and small amusement rides, which means the park is busiest after dark. Three more large parks — Horto, Ecológico and Sinésio Junqueira Franco — spread the green space around town. The street plan is unusually legible for a Brazilian interior city: boulevards run from downtown out to the periphery, tied together by a system of circular avenues. Six bus routes cover it, each running every thirty minutes, with no free transfers between them.

For a city of this size, Bebedouro keeps an odd density of museums — three of them. One is historical, one occupies the old railway station, and the third, the Museu Matarazzo, is a collection of vintage cars, aircraft and firearms. The railway theme runs deeper than the station museum. Between Bebedouro and the district of Botafogo lies a locality called Mirante de São Paulo, remembered locally for one reason: there used to be a train station there. The trains stopped and the name stayed, which is a very Bebedouro sort of history — the place identified by something that used to happen at it, exactly like the stream the town was named for.

The municipality covers 683.2 square kilometres and contains more than the city itself. Botafogo, with about 2,000 residents, and Turvínea, with about 1,000, are official districts. Two smaller villages sit outside that framework: Andes, with roughly 500 people, functions as an urban area although it has never been formally made a district, and Areias holds fewer than fifty. These are the settlements that the orange economy runs through — the places where the pickers, packers and haulers live between the groves. Bebedouro also supports three hospitals, thirteen health centres, more than thirty schools and two colleges, which is the infrastructure of a regional hub rather than a farm town.