Rio Grande

Lunch in Rio Grande

Rio Grande holds an unusual place in the geography of the south: it is the oldest city in Rio Grande do Sul, founded on 19 February 1737 by Brigadier José da Silva Paes on the narrow sandy point at the mouth of the Lagoa dos Patos, where Portuguese forces needed a military foothold against Spanish pressure from the Río de la Plata. The fort he built — Jesus, Maria e José — anchored the first permanent Portuguese settlement in what would become the state, and the barra it guarded remains one of the most strategically significant passages on the Brazilian coast. Today the port handles some of the largest cargo volumes in Brazil, and the waterfront has the industrial density to match.

The historic centre, however, is worth the lunch stop. The Praça Sete de Setembro marks the site of the original fort; around it stand neoclassical and colonial buildings that have accumulated since the city's 19th-century commercial expansion, when European merchant houses — German, English, Portuguese — established themselves along the waterfront. The Alfândega building, an imposing neoclassical customs house built at the order of the Visconde do Rio Branco and now housing the Museu Histórico da Cidade, is among the most distinguished buildings in the state. The Sobrado dos Azulejos on Rua Marechal Floriano — a 19th-century two-storey neoclassical townhouse entirely clad in Portuguese azulejos — is the only building of its kind remaining in southern Brazil.