The 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.
São 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.