Casa do Sertanista

About this place

Casa do Sertanista, or the Caxingui House, is a home built in the mid-seventeenth century in the Caxingui district of west São Paulo, an example of the «bandeirista house» of the colonial era, built by São Paulo's early settlers in the age of the bandeirante explorers. It shows all the traits of the style: rammed-earth walls, the technique used for almost every São Paulo building from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, a four-sided roof, an earthen floor and a recessed porch bounded by a wall on one side and a small room on the other. A property company donated it to the city in 1958; it was restored between 1966 and 1970 and housed the Sertanista Museum, devoted to Indigenous culture, until 1987, then an Indigenous culture centre and later a folklore museum. Today it belongs to the São Paulo City Museum, whose thirteen historic houses spread across the city are used for heritage education and exhibitions.