Cemitério da Consolação
São Paulo (São Paulo – SP)
São Paulo (São Paulo – SP)
São Paulo is the largest city of the country, with an area of 1,525 square kilometers and more than 10 million inhabitants. Its picture has changed a lot since it was a small heap of houses made of stucco, from where the “bandeirantes” (settlers) left for Minas Gerais in search of gold mines and where the Jesuits founded the “Real Collegio”. Sao Paulo was born through a Jesuit mission in January 1554, crossed a period of impoverishment and emptiness due to the gold rush, but its populational flow began to increase again when the mines in Minas Gerais broke down. It became a city on June 11, 1771.
It passed through the cycles of sugar and coffee, the deployment of the first factories, the imperial period, the opening of the ports in São Paulo to friendly nations when the royal family arrives in Rio de Janeiro. From 1880 on São Paulo gets an important economic growing position due to the coffee exports, industrialization and trading. The city became a rich and diverse cultural center, welcoming communities of Italians, Japanese, Spanish, Lebanese, Jews, among others, who have largely contributed to its growth and expansion. The first cemetery to be reported was in the Church of the Jesuits College. Until almost the end of the eighteenth century, the non-Catholics, Jews, slaves and convicts were buried in the open fields. The epidemics like smallpox and the law that banned burials inside the churches, brought about the need to create outskirts open air cemeteries. The Cemetery of the Afflicted already existed so afterwards the bodies were exhumed and transferred to the Cemetery of Consolation, which was installed in 1858. For being a public cemetery, it previously housed deceased of all the social classes. There were several difficulties for its construction , since the choice of the place till the disapproval of the Catholic community that did not accept the burials out of the churches. It was built on top of “Consolação” considered at that time the most remote place from town and scarcely inhabited. Currently, the city of São Paulo has 40 cemeteries, 22 are public and 18 are private.
The Cemetery of Consolation is located in a place previously surrounded by little farms, on the top of Consolação. The site has become one of the most valued in the city – Higienópolis District. The cemetery has approximately 77 thousand square meters, 8,200 graves of various sizes. The main entrance is on Avenida Consolação, having a neoclassical gate built by Ramos de Azevedo in 1902.
Originally the Cemetery of Consolation was supposed to receive the dead from all the social classes. Gradually it became a representative cemetery of the “paulistana” high society. Nowadays it houses mainly sumptuous tombs of important business men and quatercentary families. Currently, visitors and tourists visit the place in search of historical and artistic value tombs. We emphasize the tombs of: Ademar Pereira Barros (Governor of São Paulo – 1847 – 51), Antonio da Silva Prado (Mayor of Sao Paulo – from 1899 to 1911), Armando de Salles Oliveira (Governor of São Paulo 1931 – 1935); the Count Francisco Matarazzo (Industrial), Francisco de Paula Ramos de Azevedo (engineer and architect); Francisco Schimidt (coffee farmer); Geremia Lunardelli (coffee farmer), Guiomar Novaes (pianist), José de Freitas Valle (Maecenas and politician); Luiz Pereira Barreto (scientist ), Mário de Andrade (writer), Marchioness of Santos (meritorious), Manoel Ferraz de Campos Salles (President of the Republic – 1898 – 1902), Oswald de Andrade (writer); Tarsila do Amaral (painter), Washington Luis Pereira de Souza (President of the Republic – 1926 – 1930).
The Cemetery of Consolation is one of the most important “Open Air Museums” in Brazil. This is due to the great amount of funerary works built by European and Brazilian marble carvers and sculptors. There we find works by Luigi Brizzolara, Victor Brecheret, Francisco Leopoldo e Silva, Ricardo Pavone, Amadeo Zani, Nicola Rollo, Antelo Del Débbio, Galileo Emendábili. Each one of them through his own art and talent shaped this place with eclectic, art nouveau, art dèco and modern monuments, in tune with what was happening in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. There are also buried people who have contributed to the construction of the “paulistana” and Brazilian history. It is a Memorial constantly researched by Social and Art Historians and Geographers, one of the reasons of being an important tourist point in the city of São Paulo.
Cemetery is a cultural institution of the Western society. The preservation of its heritage is one way to legitimize it, as well as artistics and cultural activities carried on in situ.
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