Sertanista House

The Sertanista House, also called the Caxingui House, is a residence in the Caxingui neighborhood of São Paulo, Brazil, built in the middle of the seventeenth century. It is a surviving example of the bandeirista house of the Brazilian colonial period, with walls of rammed earth, a roof of four slopes, an earthen floor and a re-entrant porch closed by a wall on one side and a small room on the other. Rammed earth was the technique that characterised the buildings of São Paulo from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The house was donated to the city in 1958 by Cia. City de Melhoramentos, its owner at the time, and was restored between 1966 and 1970. It then housed the Sertanista Museum with a collection on indigenous culture until 1987, later the Indigenous Culture Center of the Union of Indigenous Nations, and from 2000 the Rossini Tavares de Lima Folklore Museum. Today it belongs to the architectural collection of the Museum of the City of São Paulo, one of thirteen historic houses the museum keeps as heritage education spaces.