The parish takes its name from the Igreja da Sé — the Cathedral — which has stood in Macau since the 16th century, making it one of the oldest Catholic cathedrals in the Far East. But the Sé parish today is far more than a religious precinct. It is the financial center of Macau, home to more than twenty banks, the Legislative Assembly, the Macau General Post Office, and the headquarters of Air Macau. The cathedral gave the district its name but not its character; that was shaped by centuries of commerce, diplomacy, and administration converging on the same tight peninsula. The western part of the parish — the historic financial core — still carries the texture of its colonial past in low-rise Portuguese facades and narrow streets. A few blocks east, the NAPE and ZAPE zones rise from land reclaimed from the sea, all glass towers and ferry terminals, oriented entirely toward the twenty-first century.

Much of what is now eastern Sé did not exist a generation ago. The NAPE (Novos Aterros do Porto Exterior) reclamation project added substantial territory to the parish on land pushed out into the Pearl River estuary. It is a reminder that Macau has always grown by accumulation — the Portuguese built outward from their original settlement, the casino economy added capacity wherever it could, and the sea kept retreating in the face of engineering. The Outer Harbour Ferry Terminal, connecting Sé to Hong Kong and mainland China multiple times daily, sits on this reclaimed edge. So does the University of Saint Joseph's original campus. The eastern high-rises feel like a different city from the cobblestone lanes around Senado Square — and in a sense, that is exactly what they are, just a newer layer pressed up against the older ones.

The density of significant institutions packed into Sé is difficult to convey without listing them, and even lists feel inadequate. The Legislative Assembly deliberates here. So do the Macau branches of the consulates-general of Portugal, the Philippines, Angola, and Mozambique — a roster that traces the old Portuguese colonial network across three continents. The Taipei Economic and Cultural Office operates a few streets from the PRC's own Liaison Office, an arrangement that would be unthinkable almost anywhere else on earth. Macau's public hospital, the Conde S. Januário, serves patients in the same parish as some of the world's largest hotel-casinos. Macao Polytechnic University runs degree programs next door to establishments where people come for entirely different reasons. The compression is the point: Sé is where Macau conducts its serious business, in every sense of that phrase.

Walk south from Senado Square through Sé and the city shifts register every few hundred meters. The historic churches and colonial facades give way to the Praia Grande boulevard along Nam Van Lake, then to the glittering casino strip, and finally to the Macau Tower standing at the southern tip of the peninsula. The Grand Prix Museum preserves the circuit's racing history in the same district where St. Dominic's Church has held mass since the 16th century. It should feel incoherent. Somehow it does not. Sé has a long practice of absorbing whatever the next era brings without losing the evidence of what came before, which is perhaps the most distinctly Macanese thing about it.