The Laguna’s main square: from holy ground to mundane stage

Abstract

Laguna was officially established in 1676. The colonisers ordered the erection of the Christian Cross and, in 1696, a simple chapel with a front churchyard, Campo Santo, a sacred vacant area. The building was subsequently enlarged and reformed, and the Campo Santo was improved through sanitation and embellishment. It became the city’s main square, its sociability locus and the stage for the social display of the wealthiest. Now popularly known as Praça da Matriz, it showcases some of the site’s permanences: from the colonial village to the republican city and the actual heritage-protected Centre. This article aims to recognise the Praça da Matriz as a historical and landscape document and as a cultural heritage of Laguna, comprising its landscape composition as a garden of historical interest. It uses historical and case study methods, including data collection, through direct and indirect documentation, with the investigation and on-site survey. The research uses the hypothetical-deductive method. It defends that, although the separation between the State and the Church occurs at the end of the XIX century, the Praça da Matriz ratified, as a historical, landscape and cultural legacy, the city of Laguna originated and preserved as a Portuguese and Catholic city.