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COLONIAL TOWNS OF SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE AMERICA

ROBERT C. SMITH

IN THE TWO centuries between 1500 and 1700 six European nations established towns and colonies in the Americas. Of these only Spain laid out towns according to a regular and unvarying plan. This plan represented an orderly practical concept without precedent in the immediate background of Europe. It involved not only the careful consideration of the site from the standpoint of terrain and climate but also the introduction of a gridiron plan of broad straight streets intersecting one another at right angles to form rectangular blocks and open squares. The plan was the result of a num- ber of royal orders first codified in 1523 at the time of the conquest of Mexico and incorporated in what are known as the Laws of the Indies, which were followed in all sub- sequent Spanish colonization until the end of the colonial period.'

The gridiron plan, used in Mesopotamia and in ancient Egyptian cities, had been the standard scheme for plotting Graeco-Roman cities. It was almost entirely abandoned, however, in medieval times in favor of an irregular system of crooked streets and uneven spaces that obeyed a very different kind of planning. The revival of the gridiron in Spanish America was, therefore, a revival of a common- place of antiquity and as such is characteristic of the Ren- aissance. It was also one of the outstanding American con- tributions to the history of urbanism because the revival of the gridiron plan took place in the new world before it be- came accepted in Europe.

Before the conquest of Mexico one important urban site had been laid out in Spanish America. This was the town of Santo Domingo on Columbus' island of Hispaniola, the modern Ciudad Trujillo, capital of the Dominican Repub- lic, which was founded in 1496. King Ferdinand, writing to his military governor Nicolas de Ovando, said that "from here it is not possible to give precise instructions" and left to the governor himself the responsibility of deter- mining the plan to be followed.2 The one that was adopted on the spot is, however, related to the whole subsequent development because it includes a number of regular ar- teries running parallel from a principal square containing

the cathedral and city hall and a number of less regular open spaces with their respective churches.3 The result was sufficiently impressive to lead the Italian bishop Geraldini upon his arrival at Santo Domingo in 1520 to commend the streets as broader and straighter than those of his native Florence." In contriving this plan it is probable that the soldier Ovando and his associates were less concerned with the theory of an ideal city than with the recollection of a hastily contrived but efficiently laid-out military camp which some of them had known. This was the temporary castrum of Santa FK, which Ferdinand and Isabella had created in two and one-half months in 1491 in order to launch the successful siege of Granada which drove the last Moors from Spain. Santa Fe was drawn up as a fortified rectangle intersected by the crossing of two perpendicular axes and approached by four cardinal gates. Santo Do- mingo was provided with walls for defence from marauders approaching by sea and was thus the forerunner of all the subsequent heavily fortified Spanish strongholds of the Antilles and the Gulf of Mexico.

In 1520 Hernando Cort6s took the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan and completed the conquest of Mexico, which now became New Spain. Almost at once it was decided to rebuild the city, devastated by the terrible campaign, upon the same site; thus was laid the groundwork for the modern City of Mexico. The Spanish surveyor Alonso Garcia Bravo was employed in 1524 to draw up the plan.5 This was the first example of the gridiron scheme, the use of which was by now specifically required by law, having been already suggested in the royal instructions to Pedrarias Davila on the occasion of his first expedition to the mainland in 1513.6 Fourteen streets intersecting each other at right angles were laid out around a central Plaza Mayor, which was to contain the cathedral and the residence of the gov- ernor. This was in reality the center of the old Aztec city, as is shown by a woodcut map published with a letter from Cortes at Nuremberg in 1524.7 It was there that the prin- cipal temples and palaces had been located, approached by broad thoroughfares in four directions like those in other Indian towns described by the Spanish friar Mo- tolinia, who called attention to "the large square court in the best part of the town" and "the very straight highways"

ROBERT C. SMITH is a member of the Department of the History of Art, University of Pennsylvania, and of the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture of the University of Delaware.

Colonial Towns of Spanish and Portuguese America 3

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that led to it. In this respect the new Spanish urbanism followed an Aztec tradition but there is no proof that the Indians knew or used the full gridiron arrangement.

In devising their plan the Spaniards were obeying the trend established by Italian humanists of the 15th century, who revived in theory, if not in fact, the orderly layout of classical cities, for none of their designs were actually car- ried out. Men like Alberti and Filarete based their plans for ideal cities upon the monumental concept they obtained from reading the text of Vitruvius, the chief original writ- ten source for information on Graeco-Roman architecture. From him they developed their taste for broad squares, stately colonnades and straight thoroughfares, but they used these features on a radial rather than a gridiron basis, apparently because Vitruvius was not sufficiently specific in describing the street pattern of his city and because the radial system was common in the middle ages. Thus none of the town plans of the Italian humanists which came to be known in Spain by the early years of the 16th century can be considered precise models for the master plan of the Laws of the Indies. Some other explanation of the origin of the Spanish gridiron must, therefore, be sought. It may have come from a new interpretation of Vitruvius on ancient urbanism; it may have been derived (but this is improbable) from the Roman towns of Spain; or again it may have evolved from the camp at Santa Fe, which in turn may have been influenced by the only real gridiron plans of the middle ages, which occur at Montpazier, Mi- rande and other 13th-century bastides of Southern France.8 Whatever its origin, the plan in Spanish America was ef- fectively combined with the monumental classical concept of the city advanced by the humanists of Italy. The dialogue of Cervantes de Salazar, published in 1554 after the re-

building of Mexico City, proves beyond question that the fine streets with regular fagades joining handsome sym- metrical squares, which were so highly praised by foreign visitors of the period, were accepted in New Spain as an essential part of the Italian understanding of urbanism based on Vitruvius. At the same time, however, this concept bore no practical fruit in Old Spain, where even in Philip II's new capital of Madrid the whole 16th century passed without an end being put to the irregularities and crowd- ing of medieval construction. It was not, in fact, until 1617 that the building of the Plaza Mayor gave Madrid a large symmetrical square handsomely adorned in the fashion of the broad open spaces of Mexico and the other urban cen- ters of Spanish America.9

The 16th-century appearance of the City of Mexico, the greatest metropolis of the Americas, is represented in a number of documents, one of the most interesting of which is a drawing of 1596 in the Archivo de Indias at Seville (Fig. 1). In the center was the main plaza, according to the rule imposed by the Laws of the Indies for inland cities. One side was occupied by the cathedral which was in course of construction from 1563 to 1665. Adjacent to it at the east rose the palace of Cortes which took the place of that of Montezuma. The other two sides were filled with build- ings having ground-story colonnades, the portales of the merchants. These were required on Vitruvian precedent by the Laws "because of the great convenience that they offer to the merchants who gather here" as a protection against sun, wind and rain. They have long since disap- peared in Mexico City but in some remote places they have survived. At Cuzco in the mountainous interior of Peru they took the form of arcades and are thus closely related to the design of cloisters and the patios of some of

4 Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIV, 4

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the early houses. At the four angles of the main plaza of Mexico City appear the eight broad streets that were spec- ified in the Laws and which were not "to have colonnades that would block their juncture with the plaza." Maps of the early 17th century show the development of the rest of the gridiron by means of the same straight streets that lead to minor squares with churches and colonnaded mar- kets, repeated on a constantly expanding scale. The ar- rangement appears more clearly in a pictorial map of Cholula, another Mexican town erected on an Indian site, which dates from 1580.10 Here each parish church is iden- tified and the regularly disposed blocks of houses are faith- fully represented as equal in size, each one having been originally subdivided into the lots or solares 150 feet square, which were allotted to the first settlers. The streets measure 14 varas or approximately 39 feet in width.

Neither Mexico City, Cholula nor any of the inland towns except Lima in Peru was fortified with walls and towers of defence as were those on the seacoast. It was cus- tomary, however, in the 16th century for large houses to have some form of protection from enemies within the city. Likewise, the members of the religious orders who founded their rural convents all over Mexico in the 16th century took the precaution of fortifying their churches with towers of defence, buttresses and battlements. The resulting buildings resemble the fortified churches which continued to be erected after the Albigensian heresy in unwalled towns of southern France. A 1580 map of Hue- jutla in the state of Hidalgo shows the regular streets intersecting at right angles that were provided for the In- dian villages constructed by Spaniards adjacent to the con- vents and their churches.11 These village plans in imitation of the gridirons of the cities gave impressive vistas to modest settings, not only in Mexico but all over Spanish America.

The same laws of town planning were applied in every part of the Indies during the 16th century, the crucial pe- riod for the laying out of towns in the Spanish domains of the New World. From Bogota, founded in 1538, to Santiago de Chile, a town created in 1541, and La Paz in Bolivia of 1548, the regular scheme of the gridiron was repeated all over Spanish South America, following the precedents already created in Mexico. In the Laws of the Indies the founders were cautioned against selecting sites that were either too high or too low for the good health of the inhabitants or of such irregular terrain as to inter- fere with the proper use of the gridiron plan. At Lima in 1535 Pizarro and his companions chose a site that was practically ideal since the ground was almost completely level. The level site is characteristic of Popayin in Colom- bia, Puebla in Mexico, Antigua in Guatemala and indeed of almost all the early centers of the Spanish colonies. Ex- ceptions like Quito in Ecuador do exist, where the whole city is spread out on a hillside, but that is because of the

decision made in 1534, at the time the old Inca settlement was captured, to establish the new town on the old site.

After the site was chosen, the Laws directed that the pre- existent plan be laid out a cordel y regla, with rigorous exactitude. The first concern was the location of the prin- cipal square, "symmetrical, harmonious and monumental," as George Kubler has called it, so that "the four corners of the plaza face to the four principal winds, because in this way the streets leaving the plaza are not exposed to the principal winds, which would be of great inconvenience." In this respect (and there are others) the Laws of the Indies follow instructions laid down long before by Vi- truvius. For the plaza mayor the Laws recommended an ideal size of six hundred by four hundred feet so that it would be big enough for the fiestas de caballos, the tra- ditional equestrian sports of Spain. In inland towns the principal square was to be in the center of the city and in port settlements at the water's edge. This, for example, is still the disposition of Buenos Aires, where the city is fo- cused upon the Plaza de Mayo, which was laid out on the waterfront at the time of the refounding of the old town in 1580.12

The principal square is almost invariably dominated by the metropolitan church, generally in large centers a cathe- dral, "raised up somewhat," according to the Laws of the Indies, so that it can be seen advantageously, as Vitruvius had recommended for the chief temples of Roman cities. In regard to the location of these buildings there is what seems to be a discrepancy between the codified instruc- tions and the actual practice because the Laws specifically direct that the cathedral was to be erected not in the prin- cipal square but in "some separate and prominent place." Perhaps the explanation of this confusing expression is that the Laws were forbidding the construction of the cathe- dral inside the periphery of the square, as was often the custom in the Middle Ages, a custom which it is important to note was still followed at Santo Domingo where the cathedral occupies a position within the principal plaza. In contra-distinction, the "separate place" of the Laws probably meant the side of the square, where churches, following the laying-out of Mexico City, were invariably placed. Some cathedrals, like those of Mexico City, Quito and Bogota, have free-standing churches called Sagrarios Metropolitanos at their sides for the performing of paro- chial ceremonies. At Tunja in Colombia there is another great ensemble of colonial architecture, for the cathedral stands beside the old Atarazana, the municipal arsenal and storehouse, which was also required to be installed in the plaza mayor by the Laws of the Indies, along with the city hall.

The long straight streets of the gridiron plan, which so greatly impressed the first English visitors to New Spain, were solidly lined with contiguous houses. Usually of but one story, especially in the earthquake areas of Peru and

Colonial Towns of Spanish and Portuguese America 5

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Central America, the typical house was arranged in the Spanish and Moorish fashion around a patio. Shops were frequently installed in the front part of the house and also at street corners, where an angle column denotes their presence. In large two-story houses like that of the Marquis of San Jorge at Bogota it was by no means unusual, fol- lowing Iberian custom, for a part or all of the ground story to be used for commerce. In a few great houses like the former mansion of the Marquis of Torre Tagle in Lima, which seems to date from about 1735, there are two interior courtyards: first one for family living, containing the great stair leading to the principal apartments on the second floor, and then one for service, around which were installed the kitchens, stables and other necessary places.

Colonial Paraguay comprised an immense territory in- cluding modern Paraguay, almost all of Argentina, as well as part of Brazil, Bolivia and Chile. It was here that Jesuit missionaries, arriving from Peru in 1587, set up the famous Repiiblica, which endured until the expulsion of their order from all the territories of Spain in 1767. To convert the Indians they established towns or reducciones, as the mis- sionary friars in Mexico had already done, but because of the absence in this distant colony of regular civil organiza- tions, these towns of the Jesuit missionaries were the only settlements in the area. Constructed and maintained by communal labor and containing sometimes as many as 7000 inhabitants, the reducciones all reflected in miniature the gridiron plan. Now, unfortunately, the Jesuit missions of Paraguay have almost entirely disappeared. They can, however, be partly reconstructed through the engraving representing that of Candelaria, considered a model for others, which was published by Father Jose Manuel Per-

amis in 1793 (Fig. 2). In the center was the single great square, each side of which measured some four hundred feet. Around it were grouped long rectangular houses called galpones occupying blocks some ninety feet in length, which were divided by broad streets. All these houses had covered porches or porticoes which produced a continuous peristyle around the entire block.

Facing the square, which contained a statue of the Virgin upon a column, was the mission church. At its right were located the cemetery and a large building for widows and orphaned girls. On the other side was the residence of the two Jesuit priests who directed the mission, constructed in characteristic fashion around a patio, and beside it, oc- cupying identical space, another court with warehouses and workshops, like the Atarazanas that stood beside metropolitan churches in the civil towns.

There is reason to believe that the Portuguese Jesuits, who first reached Brazil in 1549 and there became a great colonizing force, founding as they did four hundred years ago the present city of S. Paulo, used a not dissimilar plan for their aldeias or Indian estates. These were all, however, much smaller than the missions in Paraguay and almost nothing is known about the details of their arrangement. A drawing of 1793 (Fig. 3), in the colonial archive of Lis- bon representing the nucleus of the mission at Espirito Santo in the state of Bahia shows the church and Jesuit residence at the head of the same broad square found in the Paraguayan missions.13 But the way in which the houses are located unevenly around this square and the diagonal streets leading off from its angles represent a departure from the gridiron plan.

That plan in fact was not a characteristic of the colonial

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FIG. 2. Mission of Candelaria, Paraguay. (Engrav- ing from J. M. Peramais, S. J., De administratione guaranica, Faventiae, 1793)

6 Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIV, 4

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settlements of Brazil. At no time did the Portuguese, who discovered the country in 1500 and held it until 1822, pro- vide a code of rules for urban development. Their cities grew without being planned in a kind of picturesque con- fusion that is as typical of Luso-Brazilian cities as or- der and clarity are typical of the urbanism of Spanish America.14 Lisbon itself served as a model which was fol- lowed in various degrees of exactitude in different sites all over the Portuguese empire. That city, one of the most beautiful in Europe, is constructed upon a series of steep hills overlooking the broad expanse of the estuary of the Tagus River. The tops of these hills have been from an early time occupied by churches and convents, isolated in height and extremely difficult of access. Around them wind narrow, twisting streets and lanes, so sharply inclined that they have always presented a serious barrier to vehicular traffic. Nowhere in Europe, as a result, were litters and sedan chairs more frequently utilized than at Lisbon and Oporto, another city built in a quite similar fashion. Far below, at the port level, is the business center, constituting a lower city quite separate from the upper town. In this lower area of Lisbon the old streets were almost as narrow and irregular as those of the zone above until in 1755 an earthquake of major proportions opened the way to a great rebuilding. Then the architects of the prime minister Marquis of Pombal imposed the gridiron plan with two great squares connected by parallel streets regularly inter- secting. The waterfront square, known as the Terreiro do Paso because it originally contained a royal palace, with its handsome administrative buildings designed with continu- ous facades and its bronze equestrian statue of Joseph I (by Joaquim, Machado de Castro) is one of the outstand- ing monuments of the 18th century in Europe. A plan for a similar waterfront square in Oporto, the Praqa da Ribeira,

was made in the late 18th century by the British consul, John Whitehead, an amateur architect of distinction, but was never carried out.15

The pattern of a city at two or more levels sprawling in disordered strip formation was repeated in the Portuguese colonies almost wherever the terrain permitted. S. Paulo de Luanda in West Africa and Macau in southern China were built in this fashion and unfavorably impressed the travelers of the time. Thomas Herbert in 1638 found the streets of Old Goa in Portuguese India "narrow and nasty" 16 and the contemporary Voyage of John Hughen van Linschoten relates that "the towne lyeth uppon some hills and dales like Lisbon." 17 This compares with Do- mingo Fernindez Navarrete's account of Macau, where "there are ascents and descents, hills and dales and all rocks and sand," 18 and the remarks of the New England diarist, Harriet Low, in 1829 that "the streets [of Macau] are intolerable, hilly, irregular and horribly paved." '1 At times even the Lisbonese themselves, returning from their foreign travels, viewed with distaste the plan of their native city. Thus the secretary of Father Corria da Serra, the first Portuguese Minister Plenipotentiary in Washington, in a letter to a Philadelphia friend in 1822 observed of Lisbon: What a terrible place it is! ... These people here . . . seem to have no kind of idea of what is comfort and ease. They built their capital city on three hills, so steep and so sharp that it literally requires goat's feet and humour to be able to walk in Lisbon.20

In following this uncomfortable system of planning the Portuguese settlers seem at least in part to have been obey- ing the medieval concept of defence through height. An- other location which recommended itself for purposes of protection was the island city and this was utilized at Goa and Dio in India and at Moqambique (Fig. 4) and Luanda

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FIG. 4. (Below) Mogambique, Portuguese East Africa. (From an 18th-century map by Greg6rigo Taumaturgo de Brito, Arquivo Hist6rico Ultramarino, Lisbon)

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Colonial Towns of Spanish and Portuguese America 7

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in Africa. Both situations are found in colonial Brazil, where almost all the early settlements were made directly on the seacoast, in contrast to those of the Spanish, who in their territories preferred inland locations for their capital establishments.

Salvador in the captaincy of Bahia, which remained from its foundation in 1549 until 1763 the colonial capital of Brazil, is the closest approximation in the new world to the site and plan of Lisbon. At Salvador the administra- tive buildings as well as most of the major churches and great houses were built in the upper city, superbly over- looking the vast expanse of the Bay of All Saints and enj oy- ing at intervals a cooling breeze from the sea. Commerce and shipping, on the other hand, took up the lower level. Here was a network of lofty tenements on narrow streets, broken by dark passageways and stuffy courts, that prob- ably represented the most faithful reproduction in colonial America of the complexities of medieval conglomerate housing in Europe. The extraordinary watercolor at the Museu do Estado da Bahia showing the now demolished Morgado de Sta. Barbara (Fig. 5), expresses better than any verbal description the confusion of the port zone as it was described at the end of the 18th century by the Portu- guese schoolmaster, Luiz dos Santos Vilhena.21 "Not only are these people jealous of the land they occupy," he wrote, "but also of the very air, because not satisfied with build- ing houses like cages in four or five stories, they set them so close that from the upper floors the street can scarcely be seen . . . and the streets are extremely dark and dis- agreeable for those who walk upon them." 22 These re- marks resemble those of William Bromley, an English traveler who wrote from Lisbon in 1694 that "the Houses are generally high and the streets so narrow, that the sun comes little into them ..." 23 The Sta. Barbara watercolor shows also the wooden shutters and balconies with tiny

roofs which Vilhena noted, as well as some of the stone doorways with coats of arms and doors of deeply set panel- ing characteristic of Portuguese Renaissance building.

Steep ramps, which are still in use, and cranes and other kinds of hoists were built to join the two levels of Salvador. These can be seen in several 18th-century panoramas, in- cluding the one signed in 1758 by the Bahian engineer, Jose Ant~nio Caldas.24 In the upper city an effort was made to regularize the major streets of the central area, some of which run parallel with more or less regular intersections at right angles, their width varying from 9' 7" to 15' 5". But the squares remain long, narrow and uneven openings, like the terreiros of the middle ages in Portugal, that sometimes are located diagonally to the streets. Vilhena criticized them for their meanness and their lack of symmetry and, passing to the city as a whole, he condemned its site. "It is a pity," he wrote, "that the founders chose to seat their city on a ridge so steep and full of humps and dips that it scarce can be approached by land, when they had at their disposal what is perhaps one of the noblest locations in the world." 25 He seems to have had in mind either the relatively flat area on the coast or, as a characteristically Lusitanian solution, one of the islands in the bay. For the same reasons shortly thereafter the Portuguese exile, Raimundo Jose de Sousa Gaioso attacked the hilly site of S. Luiz do Maranhio in northern Brazil, because the irregularity of the terrain destroyed the beauty of its buildings.26

The founders of S. Paulo likewise chose a difficult loca- tion for the same motives of defense,27 while at Rio de Janeiro, established in 1567, the almost fantastic land for- mations impeded the development of the city, which at the

beginning was pretty well confined, like some medieval hill town of Italy, to the summit of the Morro do Castelo. Thus Frei Agostinho de Sta. Maria wrote in 1714: "The

FIG. 5. (Below) Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. The Morgado de Sta. Bair- bara. (From an 18th-century watercolor in the Museu do Estado, Salvador)

FIG. 6. (Right) Rio de Janeiro. The Rua Direita and Palace Square. (From the J. R. Fragoso map, 1874)

8 Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIV, 4

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first foundations of this City were on a hill, where still can be seen the Cathedral, the Jesuit College, the fort of St. Sebastian and some old houses of the first colonists; but with the development of commerce the site became too small for new constructions and the new inhabitants began to build their houses . . . along the shore." But then he added "the City is still thrust between two mountain peaks that occupy the ends of the shoreline." 28

Here in the lower city which rapidly became the real city of Rio de Janeiro, there grew up the same irregular network of streets and passageways as at Salvador and Recife, some of which, like the Rua Gonqalves Dias, were so narrow that they have now been closed to vehicular traffic. Between the cone-like hills still occupied in true Portuguese fashion by the Franciscans and Benedictines ran the prin- cipal artery which like the main thoroughfare of Salvador was "so narrow and formless, with so many salient and re-entrant angles, that a carriage could scarcely move along it." 29 This was surprisingly named the Rua Direita or Straight Street, following a custom long used in Portu- gal which is comparable to the English tradition of calling the principal thoroughfare of a town the High Street. In fairness to this Portuguese custom, however, it should be noted that in old maps and documents the words "Rua Direita" are generally followed by some such expression as "que vai da Cadea para a Ponte" (Running from the Prison to the Bridge) indicating that the term was used to mean that the street ran not in a straight line but continuously between two given landmarks. Thus, neither at Rio de Janeiro nor elsewhere was there a system of broad thor- oughfares running straight and parallel like the ones that distinguish almost every colonial urban center of Spanish America.

FIG. 7. Cachoeira, Bahia, Brazil. Pictorial map of 1792. (Watercolor from a manuscript of Joaquim Amorim de Castro, Arents Collection, New York Public Library)

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In the center of the new town of Rio de Janeiro, which grew up in the 17th century, is the waterfront Praga do Palaicio, where the position of the governor's residence corresponded to that of the old royal palace in the similar square in Lisbon and the fountain of Maria I to the eques- trian statue of her father, King Joseph (Fig. 6). There is an almost identical waterside square at Luanda in Portu- guese West Africa, containing the governor's palace and an obelisk erected in honor of John VI's acclamation in 1816. Both colonial squares were evidently created in remi- niscence of the majestic Terreiro do Paqo in Lisbon and it is significant that the one monumental expression in the early town planning of these two cities of the Portuguese empire symbolizes one of the noblest aspects of their tradi- tional civilization-the Lusitanian conquest of the seas.

To understand the complete variety in the laying-out of streets in typical Brazilian colonial towns, we can con- sider the formation of two small but characteristic sites: Cachoeira and Ouro Preto. Cachoeira, a 17th-century settlement in Bahia, is represented in a pictorial plan of 1792 contained in a manuscript of the local judge Joaquim Amorim de Castro, now in the Arents collection at the New York Public Library (Fig. 7). The town is situated on both sides of the River Paraguassfi in the center of a rich sugar and tobacco area near Salvador and in the 18th cen- tury enjoyed considerable prominence because of its loca- tion at the end of the land route from the gold country of Minas Gerais.

The plan of the main section consists of a series of long narrow open spaces that correspond to the even rectangular plazas of the Spanish American towns. Adjacent to the waterfront, at the end of one of these terreiros, as they were called in both Portugal and Brazil, stands the pelourinho,

FIG. 8. Mariana, Minas Gerais, Brazil. The new quarter of 1745. (From an 18th-century map in the Arquivo Militar, Rio de Janeiro)

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Colonial Towns of Spanish and Portuguese America 9

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or post of royal justice, a monument symbolizing the rec- ognition of the town by Portuguese authority, which in the colonial period was found in every chartered town. In the center of another terreiro, and thus in direct opposi- tion to the custom prevailing in Spanish America, rises the parish church of N. S. do Rosairio. Beside a third, which is oriented in a contrary direction, are located the buildings of the Carmelite order in Cachoeira. Around these uneven places twist and wind the curving streets, almost without semblance of preconceived plan. There is a relationship be- tween these radial elements and the plans of many medieval towns in Portugal, France and Spain but there is absolutely no connection with the gridiron plan. On the contrary, the same arrangement, or rather lack of arrangement, can be seen in the topographic map of the Portuguese military engineer, Greg6rio Taumaturgo de Brito, representing Mogambique in the second half of the 18th century (Fig. 4), which could easily be mistaken for some colonial town in Brazil and, were it larger, for Cachoeira itself.

Ouro Preto, the old capital of the state of Minas Gerais, was founded in 1711 for purposes of trade in a rich gold- mining region west of Rio. The tortuous nature of the plan here is even more apparent.30 The central square is again long and narrow and not entirely regular and this time it actually curves as it dips in the middle between the old governor's palace and the fine 18th-century town hall. Here there is no church because the Portuguese sometimes preferred to place their religious edifices at a short distance from the principal square. The streets, of widely varying width, curve in capricious conformance to the rugged and eccentric topography of the site on which the town is erected. In reality there is but a single principal thorough- fare, which in its meandering connects widely separated nuclei of settlement, representing the early arraiais or trad- ing posts and the primitive chapels later replaced by the two parish churches and those of the Third Orders, which played an important part in the social life of the town. Ouro Preto, a unique survival from the 18th century, is so remarkably well preserved that it is possible to traverse it with a minimum of contact with the world of today. In so doing the visitor descends a steep hill to enter the town, immediately ascends another to reach the principal square, then makes a precipitous decline only to mount a third elevation before leaving the place. As a result he forms an impression of a town built not on two levels but on count- less levels, none of which can be exactly defined, so con- stantly are they changing. There is here a complicated prismatic effect of space, dramatically opposed to the sim- ple spatial elements of a Spanish American town. The houses are also different, for in accordance with a general Portuguese custom they have no interior patios and their exteriors present a more animated expression through the use of large windows with movable sashes, derived from Portuguese contacts with England and Holland.

Although Luso-Brazilian urbanism represents in general the survival of medieval irregularities and the strip system of planning into the baroque age of the 17th and 18th cen- turies, some efforts in the direction of more compact and regular formations were made in colonial Brazil. The ear- liest seems to have occurred at Recife, the capital of Per- nambuco, a zone of sugar plantations in the northern part of the country. The wealth of this area attracted the atten- tion of the Dutch West Indies Company, which had little trouble in seizing it in 1630, for the Portuguese settlers had relied for defence upon hills rather than upon cannon and men. Between then and the year of their expulsion, 1654, the Dutch built the new port city of Recife upon an island between two rivers in an undertaking which presents the most interesting parallels with their contemporary develop- ment of Nieuw Amsterdam on the Island of Manhattan in North America. Here at Recife were constructed the same Dutch houses with gabled fagades facing the streets but with tropical galleries, slave quarters and palm gardens. At the north end of the island the Dutch governor Count John Maurice of Nassau-Siegen erected his palace of Vrij- burg, the most monumental structure of the time in Brazil and surrounded it with a group of evenly aligned squares and gardens that constitute the first instance of regular planning on a large scale in the country.31 But this was the work of a foreign invader. It is significant that no further developments took place until the middle of the 18th cen- tury. Then at the episcopal city of Mariana near Ouro Preto in Minas Gerais the military engineer Jose Fernandes Pinto Alpoim was employed in 1745 to construct a new quarter with straight streets intersecting at right angles (Fig. 8). This seems to be the earliest example of the Portuguese use of the gridiron in Brazil. It certainly ante-dates the appearance of the form in Portugal in the rebuilding of Lisbon after the earthquake of 1755 and the laying out of the new model town of Vila Real de Sto. Antonio on the Guadiana River in 1774 by order of Pombal, where the full gridiron arrangement was employed as a mark of progress and efficiency.32

Elements of the same plan appear in all the Brazilian towns founded at the very end of the colonial period, for one of which, Linhares in Espirito Santo, there is a draw- ing dated 1819 in the Biblioteca Nacional at Rio de Janeiro. The most extraordinary demonstration of the new direc- tion in urbanism in this period, however, is found in two drawings by the French painter, Armand Julien Palliere, also executed in 1819 and now in the collection of Fran- cisco Marques dos Santos at Petr6polis. They represent the old town of Vila Real da Praia Grande, now known as Niteroi, which lies across the Bay of Guanabara from Rio.33 In 1816 King John VI of Portugal during his twelve year residence in Brazil had visited the place and granted it a civic charter. This action served as an incentive for a considerable enlargement of the town.

10 Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIV, 4

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One of these drawings is remarkable because it shows side by side the old town and the new one (Fig. 9). The former appears as a narrow strip hugging the shoreline of the Praia Grande or Great Beach, exactly as at such typical old Portuguese settlements as Macau in China or Maranhao and Rio de Janeiro itself in Brazil. The drawing shows the long narrow terreiro with the town hall and pelourinho, the irregularly planted houses, the church upon an island hill. The new town, on the other hand, is plotted behind in the form of a regular rectangle with streets, named for members of the royal family, intersecting at right angles. There are no squares, however. Instead, at the extremities of the rectangle, symmetrically disposed, are an area for stables and a market place with radiating ave- nues. In a separate place is a large public garden, which commemorates the king's visit, planted with beds of flowers tracing the royal name. It is significant that no effort was made to incorporate the administrative buildings or prin- cipal churches in the new area, which was to remain an exclusively residential and commercial district. The plan of the new town of Vila Real da Praia Grande was, there- fore, a compromise arrangement, since it did not envisage the abandonment of the old settlement. In this respect it follows the pattern already created at Mariana.

In conclusion, we can summarize the history of colonial town planning in Latin America as follows: The Spanish employed throughout the period the rigid formula of the gridiron plan for all their settlements after 1523. These were generally made on level inland sites carefully chosen according to a code of rules incorporated in the Laws of the Indies. As a result the old cities of Spanish America were almost all alike except for a certain variation in the

placing of the minor squares and an element of contrast provided occasionally by changes of terrain. There was a sameness about the streets of these cities with which we are well acquainted in this country because in the 19th cen- tury most of our cities were built in the same fashion. (This sameness in Spanish America has been intensified in recent times by a tendency to adopt the North American custom of numbered streets.) Broad and level thorough- fares provided easy communication throughout the town and until recently were entirely adequate to the volume of traffic. The colonnades and squares were an encourage- ment to commerce and to outdoor living. The gridiron sys- tem may have lacked originality but it did have these advantages. It also allowed practically unlimited expansion upon the same plan and provided a stamp of imperial uni- formity to a whole colonial development. In Portuguese America, on the contrary, an opposite system almost exclu- sively prevailed. Settlements were made in rugged coastal areas. They developed without formal plans in strip forma- tion at several levels, with narrow steep streets that ren- dered any communication difficult. The resulting plans are all different, disordered but picturesque.

It would then be difficult indeed to imagine two forms of urbanism more distinct than those that were employed in Portuguese and Spanish America. The one was a survival of medieval procedure which involved the repetition in America of the specific town plans of Portugal. The other, on the contrary, was a product of the Renaissance, which represented a most radical departure from the system that prevailed in the mother country. It was an early experiment in America that was to become almost universally accepted in the future. UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

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Colonial Towns of Spanish and Portuguese America 11

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This paper was read before a seminar of the Northeastern Coun- cil on Latin American and Inter-American Studies held at Brooklyn College, November 1954.

1. Excerpts from the code in English translation are published in Dan Stanislawski, "Early Spanish Town Planning in the New World," Geographical Review, XXXVII, 1 (1947), 94-105.

2. Ibid., p. 95. 3. The plan is reproduced together with information about the

early buildings in Diego Angulo, Historia del arte hispano-americano (Barcelona, 1945), I, Fig. 92.

4. Ibid., p. 84. 5. Early Mexican town planning is discussed in detail in George

Kubler, The Sixteenth-Century Architecture of Mexico (New Haven, 1948), I, Chap. II. The examples here cited, unless otherwise identified, are taken from this source.

6. Stanislawski, op. cit., p. 96. 7. Ibid., Fig. 1. 8. Pierre Lavedan, Histoire de l'urbanisme: Antiquith et moyen-

dge (Paris, 1926), pp. 399-402. 9. Lavedan, Histoire de l'urbanisme: Renaissance et temps

modernes (Paris, 1941), Fig. 206. 10. Kubler, op. cit., Fig. 22. 11. Ibid., Fig. 27. 12. For an old plan see Lavedan, Renaissance et temps modernes,

Fig. 219. 13. R. C. Smith, Arquitetura colonial bahiana (Bahia, 1951),

pp. 59-61. 14. Sergio Buarque de Holanda, Raizes do Brasil, 2 ed. (Rio,

1948), Chap. 4; Smith, "Baroque Architecture in Brazil" in H. Livermore, Portugal and Brazil (Oxford, 1953), pp. 366-67.

15. Smith, "A Brazilian Merchants' Exchange," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ser. VI, XXXVI (1949), 88-89.

16. Some Years Travels into Africa and Asia the Great (London, 1638), p. 32.

17. The Voyage of John Hughen van Linschoten (London, 1885), I, 179.

18. An Account of the Empire of China in Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1732), I, 260-61.

19. Diary of Mrs. William H. Low, manuscript in the Division of Orientalia, Library of Congress.

20. Letter of E. J. Correa da Serra to John Vaughan, Lisbon Jan. 19, 1822, in the manuscript collection of the American Philo- sophical Society in Philadelphia.

21. Smith, "Some Views of Colonial Bahia," Belas Artes, ser. 2, I (1948), 34-40.

22. Recopilagao de noticias soteropolitanas (Bahia, 1920), I, 91- 92.

23. Several Years Travel of a Gentleman through Portugal (Lon- don, 1702), pp. 3-4.

24. Jose Ant6nio Caldas, Noticia geral de toda esta capitania da Bahia, ed. facsimilar (Bahia, 1951), frontispiece.

25. Op. cit., I, 109. 26. Compendio histdrico-politico dos principios da lavoura do

Maranhio (Paris, 1818), p. 113. 27. Ernani Silva Bruno, Histdria e tradigies da cidade de S. Paulo

(Rio, 1953), I. 28. Santudrio mariano (Lisboa, 1722), X, 7. 29. Vilhena, op. cit., I, 91. 30. The plan of Ouro Preto is reproduced in Paulo F. Santos, A

arquitetura religiosa de Ouro Preto (Rio, 1951) and Sylvio de Vas- concellos, Arquitetura particular em Vila Rica (Belo Horizonte, 1951).

31. For illustrations see Joaquim de Sousa Le'ao filho, "Palaicio das Torres," Revista do patrim6nio hist6rico e artistico nacional, X (1946), 135-168.

32. Lavedan, Renaissance et temps modernes, Fig. 215. An earlier example seems to exist at the town of Tomar, the headquarters of the Military Order of Christ, which may have been laid out by Prince Henry the Navigator when he served as Grand Master of the order between 1418 and 1430 (J. M. Santos Sim-es, Tomar e a sua judiaria [Tomar, 19431, p. 29).

33. Reproduced in F. Marques dos Santos, "0 ambiente artistico fluminense ia chegada da missl"o francesa em 1816," Revista do patrimonio, V (1941), 213-240.

12 Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIV, 4

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