Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to discuss some facts about Angra’s foundation process, historical evolution and urban morphology.Namely how Angra was planned and designed to be a capital city and how that can be sought on its morphological structure today.

Paper long abstract:

Angra is a Portuguese new town founded in the Azores archipelago in the last quarter of the 15th century, when the central power improved the settlement process on these islands, regarding a new and more dynamic phase of the Atlantic Expansion.

During the 16th century, Angra became an important key point of the Portuguese urban network of the Atlantic, becoming the headquarter of the Provedoria da Armada, the institution responsible since 1522 for the protection of the Indian Route in the north Atlantic area. By the year of 1534 Angra was chosen to be the headquarters of the new Azorean dioceses, and the first settlement in the archipelago's to obtain the city title.

Nevertheless, at that point Angra was already informally the archipelago's capital, and its image and materiality must have, inevitably, expressed it.

Namely, it is important to stress how, along with Angra's exceptional urban design, which was devised and laid out according to geometrical principals, some equipments have been planned to integrate the settlement pattern, such as the church aligned with the street pattern, or the main street, the Rua Direita, a street that was planned with 11 meters wide, combining the metric system that covers the totality of the settlement pattern. Even so both this procedures were rare in the Portuguese townscape at that time, being reserved only to major urban centers in the mainland, the general plan follows the usual urban foundational program, experimented for centuries in the Christian conquest and settlement process.