The Imperial Government of Brazil published, in 1870, the first official act relative to the concession in order to make improvements at Port of Santos. Such initiative did not cheat success and the concession was suspended ten years later. A group of representatives of the commerce and the industry of Santos and São Paulo cities complaints to the government in a 1882 manifest, that presented the following situation of the Port of Santos: “The Port of Santos is found in the most deplorable state. Without wharf and ways of discharges, devastated for the yellow fever, with dismantled customs, it does not possess derricks and warehouses to receive and to condition merchandises, it does not possess staff enough to forward them with the indispensable promptness, it does not possess until the most necessary utensils, having its materialized bay of ships, that wait long months from the time arrives to unload. The streets and squares of the city are crowded of merchandises of all species, displayed to environment and the robbery”.
Some of the elements of what it would come to be, a century later, called of “Cost-Brazil”, already were gifts since then.
In 1882, the Government of the Province of Sao Paulo got, by means of decree, authorization to develop the project of construction and exploration of the place, but the failure if repeated: the beginning of the workmanships was postponed by much time until the plan to be abandoned, in 1886.
The incapacity of the State in promoting the organization and the necessary modernization became the propeller spring of the process of concession for the private initiative that occurred in 1888. In this year, the company Gaffrée, Guinle and Co. it was constituted, establishing the Company Docks of Santos, under the regimen of monopolist private concession, after frustrate attempts of the Central Government and the State for the construction of a organized port in the city of Santos. The year of 1888 is considered a landmark of the transition between the period of disorganization and the period of the organized port.
In February 3rd of 1892, four years after the signature of the concession contract, the English ship “
Nasmith” inaugurated the first 260 meters of wharf. The inauguration of the port generated an expectation of reduction of the logistic costs, as story of the Company Docks of Santos, of 1894: “The advantages are become well clear in the reduction of the expenditures, such as the enormous maritime freights with that the merchandises destined to the port of Santos, and the exaggerated cost of the stowage of the ships and the terrestrial transport were overloaded.
It still increases the elimination of the onerous stays, that had the ships there, for lack of ways of discharge and warehouses for deposit of merchandises, and the ceasing them embezzlements of these, that were very common in Santos”
The first period of great congestion in the Port of Santos that occurred in the years of 1894/95, was provoked, mainly, for the insufficient and deficiency of the railroad transport, for the delay in the discharges of the ships, difficulties in the movement of merchandises, causing load agglomeration. At that time the port put into motion, annually, about half million of tons.
One perceives that the port congestion, provoked for logistic restrictions, is not a new phenomenon in Santos. The penalty applied for the company of navigation (ship owners) to the maritime freight of ships to Santos, in on-price form, so divulged at the time of the great congestions of the decades of 1980, and at the beginning of the decade of 1990, had occurred in similar way about one hundred years behind.
The Port of Santos was created and organized administratively in 1888, by means of Concession to the private initiative in regimen of private monopoly, that lasted up to 1980, when was created the Company Docks of the State of São Paulo - CODESP, for then operatingin regimen of public monopoly.
Since that he was servant, the organized port coexisted alternating periods of stagnation and congestions, brought for the growth of the demand not followed by the corresponding investments necessary in infrastructure to supply the demand by means of efficient the port rendering of services.