São Paulo dos Campos de Piratininga

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Pátio do Colégio in São Paulo. The place where the city was founded.

São Paulo dos Campos de Piratininga (Saint Paul on the Fields of Piratininga in Portuguese) was the village that grew into São Paulo, Brazil in the region known as Campos de Piratininga. It was the inland correspondent of São Vicente, founded as a religious Mission and a Jesuit Royal College by priests José de Anchieta and Manoel da Nóbrega in January 25, 1554 (the date of the first mass and the anniversary of Saint Paul's conversion). The village was initially populated by Portuguese colonists and two tribes of the Guainá Amerindians. Later, São Paulo became the origin of the Bandeiras in the great colonial expansion of the 17th century.

In the place of the original modest mud house which was built by the Jesuits in 1554, a much larger and solid building with a church and a seminar was erected in 1653, and was named Pátio do Colégio (Portuguese for School Yard). It still remains in good shape to this date, the oldest colonial building in São Paulo. It houses the Anchieta Museum and a cultural center.

The village of São Paulo dos Campos de Piratininga was settled as the altiplane correspondent to the one of São Vicente, Brazil, capital of the only successful Capitania of the South. Its inhabitants, called Paulistas were very poor and started explorations called Bandeiras in search of precious metals and stones, runaway slaves, and to make new Indian slaves. Those participating in the expeditions were the Bandeirantes, including allied Indians. The language then spoken was the Língua Geral.

While the Bandeiras were responsible for multiplying Portuguese territory in America, their greatest immediate success was in finding gold in a relatively nearby mountainous region, divided from the Capitania de São Vicente (current state of São Paulo) by a low, forested mountain range, called the Matos Gerais, or General Woods.

The Bandeirantes didn't have the resources or even the numbers to settle the Mines of the General Woods, in Portuguese Minas dos Matos Gerais. Thus the mines were disputed by more numerous, better equipped recent settlers arriving expressly from Portugual, nicknamed the Emboabas. The ensuing Emboabas' War ended with the defeat of the paulistas, the opening of a New Way to the Mines of the General Woods (Caminho Novo das Minas dos Matos Gerais) linking the capital of the new Minas Gerais province, the village of Vila Rica do Ouro Preto (Rich Village of the Black Gold), to the port of São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro at the Guanabara Bay in the Rio de Janeiro province.