The Historic Centre: Pátio do Colégio and Largo do Café
Various · Sixteenth century onward
Leave the CCBB by the main door and you are standing in the oldest part of São Paulo. The streets around the bank, Rua Álvares Penteado, Rua da Quitanda and Rua São Bento, were the financial district of the coffee boom, and their corners are still marked by the ornate headquarters of banks and trading houses from the early twentieth century. Two minutes downhill is Largo do Café, the small square where coffee brokers once gathered on the pavement to trade, and a few minutes further, past the cathedral square, is the Pátio do Colégio, the place where the city began.
The Pátio is a white church and college with a bell tower, standing on a terrace above the valley. Jesuit priests founded a school here in 1554 to teach the children of Portuguese settlers and Indigenous people, and the settlement that grew around it became São Paulo. The buildings you see today are a twentieth century reconstruction on the original site, but the small museum inside holds the foundations, the first documents of the city and a room devoted to the Jesuit missionaries José de Anchieta and Manuel da Nóbrega. The terrace has a view over the old lower town toward the Mercado Municipal.
The historic centre was neglected for decades as the city moved west, and the opening of the CCBB in 2001 was one of the first signs of its recovery. Today the pedestrian streets around it are lively on weekdays and increasingly on weekends, with the Martinelli building, the Farol Santander tower, the cathedral and the São Bento monastery all within walking distance. Go in daylight, keep to the busy streets, and finish at the CCBB cafe.
Did You Know? The city of São Paulo celebrates its birthday on the twenty fifth of January, the date in 1554 when the Jesuits said the first Mass in the college on the Pátio.
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