Pateo do Collegio

This guide to Pátio do Colégio in São Paulo asks who built the city's oldest surviving wall, and answers with a Jesuit priest named Afonso Brás rather than any nobleman or mason. It traces the settlement back to 1554, when Manuel da Nóbrega and José de Anchieta raised a flimsy hut of palm thatch here, and to Brás taking over two years later with a slower, harder technique of packed rammed earth. Eight whitewashed cells, a well and vegetable gardens rose from that packed earth, a self-sufficient outpost Brás kept expanding until his death in 1610. Best heard slowly, standing in the courtyard where that first hut of palm thatch and mud once stood.