Qualla: Casa da Junta

Casa da Junta: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ricardo André Frantz (User:Tetraktys), CC BY-SA 3.0. Count the eighteenth-century buildings still standing in Porto Alegre and you will run out of fingers before you run out of one hand. There is exactly one. On Duque de Caxias Street, in the heart of the historic center, the Casa da Junta has watched the city grow up around it for more than two hundred years, a low, dignified survivor among the towers and viaducts. The Portuguese settlers who raised it in 1790 could not have imagined the centuries of recess, ruin, and revival it would endure, nor that it would still be standing when nearly everything around it had fallen.

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Image: Ricardo André Frantz (User:Tetraktys) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Casa da Junta: Born Into a Rebellion

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Tetraktys, CC BY-SA 3.0. Captain José Montanha drew the plans in 1790, working under the colonial administrator José Marcelino de Figueiredo. The building was conceived as half of a pair, joined to the old government palace next door, a tidy emblem of imperial order on the southern frontier. The order di...

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Image: User:Tetraktys | CC BY-SA 3.0

Casa da Junta: A Building That Kept Closing

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Few legislatures have been interrupted as often as the one that met here. The chamber reopened in 1845, only to fall dark again between 1865 and 1870 during the Paraguayan War. It shut once more from 1937 to 1947, when Getúlio Vargas dissolved the legislatures of his Estado Novo....

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Casa da Junta: Reading the Façade

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Tetraktys, CC BY-SA 3.0. The architecture rewards a slow look. When it was first built the Casa da Junta rose only a single floor, a plain colonial box. The remodel of 1860 added a story and recast the whole in a more fashionable dress. A round-arched doorway sits at the center, flanked by two groups of ...

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Image: User:Tetraktys | CC BY-SA 3.0

Casa da Junta: The Long Way Home

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Tetraktys, CC BY-SA 3.0. Recognition came in 1981, when the state listed the building as protected heritage. A restoration the following year turned it over to the Civil House of the state government, and in 2004 ownership returned to the Legislative Assembly, where it began a new life as the seat of the...

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Image: User:Tetraktys | CC BY-SA 3.0

Casa da Junta: The Last Witness

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Tetraktys, CC BY-SA 3.0. What makes the Casa da Junta worth seeking out is precisely how alone it stands in time. Porto Alegre grew up around the cattle trade and the river port, a young city by the standards of colonial Brazil, and it has never been sentimental about its old buildings; the viaduct-build...

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Image: User:Tetraktys | CC BY-SA 3.0