A colonial square framed by four centuriesThe Praça São Francisco stands in São Cristóvão, Sergipe — founded on 1 January 1590 and reckoned the fourth-oldest city in Brazil. The square is one of the finest surviving examples of an Iberian colonial open space in the Americas, and from above it reads exactly as it was conceived: a broad rectangle of open ground framed on its sides by monumental religious and civic buildings, with the low colonial town spreading around it. A city that was once a capitalSão Cristóvão was the first capital of the captaincy and later state of Sergipe, holding that role until the seat moved to Aracaju in 1855. Left aside by the growth of the new capital, the old town kept its colonial fabric largely intact — which is precisely why it survives today as a rare and coherent historic ensemble. The buildings of the squareThe square takes its name from the Convent and Church of São Francisco, whose foundation stone was laid in 1693 and which now houses a museum of sacred art. Around it stand the Church of the Santa Casa de Misericórdia, documented as early as 1627, and the Church of Nosso Senhor dos Passos, with a portal dated 1743 and a richly decorated Baroque interior. Together they form the architectural frame that led UNESCO to inscribe the Praça São Francisco as a World Heritage Site on 1 August 2010 — the eighteenth Brazilian site on the list.From the air the value of the place is plain: an unbuilt square deliberately left open in the 18th century, still defined by the same convent, churches and colonial houses that framed it, a surviving fragment of the ordered urbanism the Portuguese crown imposed on its colonial towns.
Buildings: Convent and Church of São Francisco (1693, now a sacred-art museum); Santa Casa de Misericórdia; Church of Nosso Senhor dos Passos (1743)