Maybe it’s because we were only there for a few days, or maybe it’s because it rained every second we were in the city. Either way, Sao Paulo wasn’t one of our favorite places.

The largest city in the southern hemisphere with nearly 20 million people living in the metro area, calling Sao Paulo huge is a gross understatement. While we saw but a fraction of the sprawling cityscape, one thing different neighborhoods we visited had in common was the proliferation of gritty, and beautiful, street art.

Here, photos we managed to snap between the raindrops.

Sao Paulo also showcases a more unique form of graffiti, called Pixação. This style, which originated in the 1940s as a response to political party slogans, is scrawled in cryptic letters across the face of most every building in the city. The beauty in this art form doesn’t lie in the paint, but instead in the location of the tag. Pixação artists risk their lives, and earn respect, by tagging the hardest to reach corners of the city, which include seemingly inaccessible freeways and the tippy-tops of buildings.

Pixação may not be much to look at, and in fact most residents hate the markings that mar the face of their city, but it sends a strong message. Brazil has one of the worst distributions of wealth in the world, with only a privileged few holding a majority of the money. This stylized scrawling appears on the most expensive of buildings, as if saying “You can’t hide from us. We’re here. And we won’t suffer in silence.”