Ribeirão Foutain

São Luís, Maranhão, Brazil

Equipment and Infrastructures

Built by the Dutch during their short period of rule in São Luís (1641-1644), the Pedras Fountain was considered “excellent and well built” in 1759. It is a wall fountain built near a romantic garden, which has an ogee pediment flanked by volutes, a denticulated frieze and a stone tank and five masonry gargoyles (identical to those on the Ribeirão Fountain). Almost dry since 1762, it was entirely rebuilt in 1822, intended above all to serve as a place where ships could take on water. The Ribeirão Fountain is the best known fountain in the old city. Behind Rua do Egipto, which descends from Largo do Carmo towards the seaside, and next to Rua dos Afogados, there used to be a big hollow with a natural spring. The place was urbanised in 1796 with a rococo fountain being placed on a retaining wall and a walled yard with stone benches laid out around it. The vertical fountain displays harmonious elegance, being made of rammed earth painted light blue, and is embellished with white rococo motifs with three lias gargoyles flanked by two dolphins, from where the water still flows. On top, there are two obelisks, while in the centre there is a small statue of Neptune placed above the delicately curved pediment. There are grated entries to three tunnels in the middle of the wall, about which the local people have invented the most curious legends – a hiding place for Jesuit gold, a secret passage to convents... But, in reality, they are nothing more than air vents, dating from the Pombaline period and forming part of the sophisticated system for capturing the rainwater that runs through the city. The surrounding streets have contemporary pavements and houses: this was a construction that had no obstacles for an 18th-century viewer.