Astrud Gilberto died in Philadelphia. She had a long history with the city.

Astrud Gilberto, the singer who popularized Brazilian bossa nova around the world with her 1963 hit “The Girl From Ipanema,” died Tuesday at 83.

According to her granddaughter, she died in Philadelphia — a city where she had a long history.

Her death was first reported by musician and family friend Paul Ricci, who said Ms. Gilberto’s son Marcelo had asked him to post the news.

Then later on Tuesday, Ms. Gilberto’s granddaughter, Sofia Gilberto, posted on Instagram.

“Life is beautiful, as the song says,” she wrote in Portuguese, “but I bring sad news that my grandmother became a star today and is next to my grandfather Joao Gilberto,” who died in 2019. Sofia Gilberto added that her grandmother died “at her home in Philadelphia.”

That would seem to confirm a story that has been rumored around the Philly music scene for decades.

Did the singer born Astrud Evangelina Weinert in Bahia, Brazil, who was known to be intensely private about her personal life move here with her second husband, Nicholas LaSorsa, and stay in Philadelphia after the marriage ended in the early 1980s?

There have long been stories that Ms. Gilberto lived alone in one of the Society Hill Towers high rises near the Delaware River waterfront. Or was she living in Narberth in Montgomery County?

In 2022, British newspaper The Independent reported that after her split from LaSorsa she “remained in Philadelphia living in privacy. In retirement, she grew interested in philosophy, painting and campaigning against cruelty to animals.”

Ms. Gilberto was not a total recluse in those years. In 1989, promoter David Gold booked her for three nights at the Hershey Hotel on South Broad Street.

And in 2001, she made her first recording in 14 years, and what would turn out to be her final album, at Indre Studios on Darien Street in South Philadelphia.

That album, Jungle, included 10 songs written by Ms. Gilberto, plus covers of Ernesto Duarte’s “Como Fué” and Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “The Look of Love.”

The album was only released on CD on the singer’s website and in Japan. It’s not available for download or on streaming services. New copies are selling for $150 on Amazon.

Around the time of the recording in 2001, Ms. Gilberto would make her most mythic appearance in Philadelphia: She went to Fergie’s Pub, the Irish bar on Sansom Street in Center City.

“Her son was in a band and she was there to see them,” recalls publican Fergus Carey. “I remember her being upstairs and being pointed out to me. I don’t think that we were introduced.” Presumably, he would have remembered.

Holly Keefe, who was there that night, remember being told that Ms. Gilberto’s son was a student at the University of the Arts. “Nancy Falkow invited me,” she said via text, of the then Philly-based singer who was Indre’s studio manager and is credited as a background singer on Jungle. She died in 2020.

“I do definitely remember the whole night thinking OMG I’M HANGING OUT WITH THE WOMAN WHO SANG THE GIRL FROM IPANEMA, while humming it in my head all night hoping I wouldn’t be uncool enough to sing it out loud.”