Brazil - Ver-o-Peso

Category: Cultural property; cultural landscape, organically evolved and continuing. An architectural and landscape ensemble, listed by IPHAN as a heritage site in 1977, comprising its urban layout, monumental buildings, rows of houses, iron markets and urban furniture, squares and docks for boats. Its spatial configuration was established and consolidated between the 17th and the first decades of the 20th century. Its origins are attributed to the implementation, in the mid-17th century, of a tax collection station at the mouth of an igarapé where there was a small natural port now corresponding to the docks. The Ver-o-Peso is a great open air market of extraction, agricultural and artisanal products brought from the Amazon region. It is formed by small and large fairs, stores selling popular products as well as two markets (one selling meat and the other, fish) extending along the Guajará Bay, in permanent relationship with the neighboring islands and the inland towns from which many of the products sold there are brought. The Ver-o-Peso is, above all, a place of intense social life and cultural exchange, where traditional labor practices take place and a complex web of social relations is woven, involving trade of a commercial but also symbolic nature.