Pirá-tininga

Piratininga lies on the plateau beyond the Serra do Mar, where rivers and wooded hills open toward the Brazilian interior. Indigenous communities inhabited this country before the foundation of São Paulo. In 1554 Jesuits including Manuel da Nóbrega and José de Anchieta established a college here, seeking to teach and convert the Indigenous people of the plateau. A settlement of earth-walled houses grew around it.

São Paulo became a centre from which armed expeditions, known as bandeiras, travelled into the interior. They sought Indigenous captives for forced labour as well as gold and precious stones. In the seventeenth century expeditions attacked Jesuit missions in the Paraná basin and carried away many thousands of Indigenous people. Such journeys extended Portuguese colonial power while bringing violence and displacement to the peoples they encountered. The expeditions often followed the Tietê and its tributaries, using river routes and knowledge of the interior to reach communities far from the Atlantic coast.

Elevated to a city in 1711, São Paulo retained its place among the routes linking the coast to the inland settlements and mines. After Brazilian independence, a law of 1827 established courses in law and social sciences in São Paulo and Olinda. The college and the new legal school reflected different stages in the town’s development, from a missionary outpost to an administrative and intellectual centre.