With geographical and religious origins the city's name is a homage to São José (Saint Joseph) and to the extense pine tree forests that used to cover the municipality territory ("pinhais").

In 1958, Nereu Ramos (President of Brazil) died in a plane crash in the Colony Murici, close to São José dos Pinhais.

São José dos Pinhais is the municipality with the fifth largest metropolitan region of Curitiba and the third in the Human Development Index (IDH in Portuguese).

It is also home to the Afonso Pena International Airport, the main air terminal in the Brazilian state of Paraná.

[5] It contains about 13% of the 49,287 hectares (121,790 acres) Guaricana National Park, created in 2014 to protect a mountainous area of Atlantic Forest.