Curitiba: walking tour

Up here on the crest of Alto São Francisco stands an archway of raw stone that never actually got to be a church. Construction on the sanctuary of São Francisco de Paula began around 1809, using the labor of enslaved stonemasons. By 1811, they had completed the chancel and sacristy. And then, work simply stopped.

For decades, the unfinished masonry sat exposed to the highland wind and rain. The final blow to its ecclesiastical future arrived in 1860, not through an earthquake or a fire, but through a matter of municipal recycling. The town elders needed stone to complete the tower of the old parish church down the hill, and this abandoned skeleton was full of finely cut blocks. So they hauled away the church's intended walls to finish someone else's building, turning an interrupted building site into a permanent ruin.

Naturally, an empty stone ruin on a lonely hilltop will attract ghost stories and pirate gold. Local folklore insisted that an English pirate named Zulmiro had escaped inland and buried plundered treasure deep beneath the foundation. That legend sounded completely harmless and fictional until late 1946, when a municipal gardener digging in the square struck a ceramic pot filled with old coins, reviving the tavern gossip in an afternoon.