Santa Catarina (English: Saint Catherine) is a former parish (freguesia) in the municipality of Lisbon, Portugal. At the administrative reorganization of Lisbon on 8 December 2012 it became part of the parish Misericórdia. Its area is 0.21 km2, and its population exceeds 4081 inhabitants (density 19433 inhabitants/km2).

History

The civil parish was instituted in on October 9, 1559, when it was de-annexed from the neighbouring parishes of Loreto (which later became Encarnação and Mártires, and included a stretch of land descending from Principe Real to Boavista. Its territory was one of the more extensive urban areas and, until the end of the 20th Century, one of the most populous. Its history was linked to Portuguese discoveries in the 14th and 15th Century, and is characterized by a diverse historical, sociological and cultural influence that mingled the aristocratic and popular. The administrative limits have suffered successive alterations, the last of which (1959) caused controversy by removing many of the emblematic infrastructures of the parish. This included, specifically, the de-annexation of the area around the Miradouro do Alto de Santa Catarina, an area considered a historical link to the areas past, and which provided in the 16th-17th Centuries assisted the patrol of the Tejo River. Many figures linked to the cultural or political life of the city (and the country) lived for a time in the parish, including Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage, Almeida Garrett, Alexandre Herculano and Camilo Castelo Branco. Also, in 1847 (on Rua de São Boaventura) Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho was born (and also lived and died), a champion of women's rights, who affirmed,

Geography

The parish is part of a mountainous area, part of the Bairro Alto, that descends south toward the Tejo, and west to toward the parish of São Bento, cutting the Calçada do Combro, supposedly the principal roadway in the formation of Lisbon, and where today is concentrated the largest group of architecturally significant buildings in the region. In the northern part of the parish is a scattering of small shops, artesian businesses, typo-graphs with a long tradition of influence on political life, bistros and coffee shops, while closer to the river, there are fewer businesses.

Architecture

Santa Catarina is a nucleus of a rich heritage of architecture, not just in quantity, but also in the importance historically. Most of the buildings, if not the facades, are representative of the 18th Century-style construction, while many religious sanctuaries have longer histories.

Civic

Religious

Notable citizens