The settlement began informally around 1732, when a few families put down roots along the shore where the Rua da Praia promenade now runs. The deliberate colonization came two decades later. In 1750 the crown ordered Azorean couples sent south, and in 1751 sixty families, roughly three hundred people, were chosen for the journey. They arrived in January 1752, and surveyors marked off 141 hectares across the peninsula for a proper town. By 1774 the settlers had built the War Arsenal, the first Mother Church, and the Governor's Palace, and four years later they ringed the landward side with fortifications. Shipyards along the water were already building vessels to order for distant Rio de Janeiro.

Fortifications hemmed the center during the Ragamuffin War, and only after the rebellion ended in 1845 did the urban fabric break free and expand. The port had become the throat through which people and goods passed across the whole province, and the city began literally manufacturing new land, pushing successive landfills out into the lake. Fountains, modern street lighting, new cemeteries, a jail, a town hall, the São Pedro opera house, and an enlarged public market followed in quick succession. The peninsula was no longer just a foothold on the frontier. It was becoming a capital, and it was making room for itself one reclaimed meter at a time.

From the late nineteenth century to the mid-1930s, Porto Alegre lived its architectural golden age. A prosperous German immigrant community set the taste, and the eclectic style it favored spread quickly among the elite raising new palaces. Three names recur on the grandest of them: the architect Theodor Wiederspahn, the engineer Rudolf Ahrons, and the decorator João Vicente Friedrichs, all of German origin, who together shaped the Piratini Palace, the Municipal Palace, the Public Library, and the Post Office. Their façades carried ethical and political symbolism in their allegorical sculpture. Rua da Praia became the elegant catwalk of the city, lined with cafés, patisseries, cinemas, and the unhurried theater of people seeing and being seen.

The 1950s were the peak; what came after was harder. In the second half of the twentieth century the center slid into decay, with population flight, deteriorating buildings, and crowded streets. Under the mayor Thompson Flores, who took office in 1969 amid the boom years of the Brazilian Miracle, the city threw up large viaducts, and in that zeal numerous old buildings of real historical worth simply disappeared. The physiognomy of the center was impoverished. Ever since, the Centro Histórico has been the subject of one revitalization plan after another, some of them genuinely successful, many still unresolved and surrounded by controversy. It remains, as it has always been, a place that argues with itself about what to keep.

For all its struggles, the district still holds an astonishing concentration of landmarks. The Praça da Matriz gathers the Metropolitan Cathedral, the Piratini Palace, the São Pedro Theatre, and the Casa da Junta around a single civic square. Down by the water stand the Public Market, the iron-and-stone bulk of the Gasômetro power station, and the Praça da Alfândega with the Rio Grande do Sul Museum of Art. The Casa de Cultura Mario Quintana, the State Public Library, and the buildings of the Federal University round out a neighborhood where, within a few blocks, you can trace every architectural phase the city has passed through since those Azorean families first came ashore.