Chapel of São João do Tibiriçá farm: memories, identification, recognition and the preservation of a rural patrimony

Abstract

The expansion of the coffee economy in the interior of São Paulo resulted in the emergence of large farms specializing in the cultivation of the grain. This trade was responsible for the arrival of three Englishmen from Liverpool to Brazil, who founded around the 1930s, in the so-called Alta Paulista, now belonging to the municipality of Gália, the great Agricultural Company Rio Tibiriçá. The Company had an architectural complex that included both the buildings responsible for the coffee growing and the equipment aimed at the coexistence of the residents, among them, the São João Chapel. A religious building composed of a nave, apse, main altar, sacristy, baptistry and choir in an English neo-Gothic style, built in apparent brick, represented in its time all the apogee of the Company until it was deactivated in 1956, dispensing the employees, having their land dismembered and their buildings dismantled in which only the Chapel remained and a few mansions. Today, the "Church of the English", as it is popularly known, is abandoned and about to collapse, even being a symbol of the city. The project identifies and recognizes this unguarded heritage, a material testimony of a period of extreme importance in the region of Gália, proposing a methodological procedure of research based on the study and recognition, inventory, identification by the population and contemporary meaning seeking to discuss the protection of the patrimony inserted in rural contexts of São Paulo generating reflections and encouraging the databases on this theme.