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When disclosing the historical and charming city of Penedo, whose foundation dates of the beginning of the Portuguese settling, after the Discovery, the visitor soon is moved by its colonial houses with roof extremities, sobradões (mud made buildings of two or more floors) of Portuguese traces, streets, secular rock staircases, churches and historical monuments, everything impeccably well-taken care of and preserved in its original status. Everything gives the impression that the time stopped there in the last 100 years so that the rich patrimony of the humanity was kept unbroken, in baroque style, only compared with the one of the also historical city of Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais that, not bothering to all its performance of considerable national tourism pole region, is newer in about 135 years, at least, and it does not count with the plasticity of the São Francisco river to enhance still more its patrimony. Nobody resists the enchantment of Penedo that, lying over an immense rock of which was raised, seems to rest in splendid cradle. Each church, each corner, each one of its monumental building, each rock that was settled there, reveals the origin and the bind with colonial Brazil: Its streets idealized on top of the sinuous curves that the river makes between the hinterland and the sea, makes to increase still more the mysticism and even the legendary that is assumed to fully involve its past.

RELICS

The "city of the sobrados" (mud made buildings whit two or more floors), as thus mentioned the master Gilberto Freyre is more than that; is a living “open sky” relic; "a stone, but a precious stone by the margins of the São Francisco", in the boundary of Alagoas and Sergipe. It became a City in the middle of XIX century, exhibiting the imperial title of “mui” noble, loyal an valorous.
In 1859, emperor D. Pedro II visited it, taking up quarters in the sobrado of the Lemos Ribeiro family, that was transformed into Imperial Paço (palace) to receive the monarch and his retinue. Today, restored, the sobrado represents a landmark of great importance for the cultural life of the city. It is good to intimately feel and live the moments lived by its people; to be able to deeply live the narrow linking that exists between the city and the "Old Chico" (a nickname to the São Francisco river); to witness the embarkation of people, some that goes and others that come, mixing with the smell of the land, in an intense movement; the barges that make the crossing - Penedo-Neópolis and vice-versa, carrying light and heavy vehicles, everything leading to the close perception of that the people of that soil piece that we are stepping on do not live only of the past, but of making now, not lingering themselves ahead of the obstacles that have to be transposed so that they Penedo raises again and firm itself as a promising center of progress, full of life and cosy. That is what its felt when seeing the churning of the waters of the "Old Chico", rocked by the sailing of the boats; canoes extending its sails as the flying of many butterflies to cheer life, at this corner, enhancing with the sumptuousity of the beautiful set of secular buildings and the exuberant plasticity of the marginal region.

Moonlight mouth
Nobody resists the enchantments of Penedo... its sunny days and the beauty that expands from the relives of the "Old Chico", the great river of the "national unit", that passes slow in direction to the sea to pour two million cubical meters of water by the second. It is difficult to somebody to resist its enchantments without feeling in the heart the emotion of the moment lived at the sundown, when from the church towers come sonorous strokes of a bell announcing the “Ave Maria”. – It makes to take off the hat and pray...
The king-star laying its great light rays over mountains, serene and full of glow. The afternoon falls sadly, leaving a turmoil of memories. And here comes the night... and the full moon can give the air of its grace today, to leave the moonlit mouths singing love things... - the moonlight of the hinterland is always prettier! There is no moonlight as this... interrupts a happy youngster that tries to fall in love with the night and to captivate the beautiful tanned girl seated at a corner, plagiarizing some sertaneja’s song that it is played to the sound of the viola and the guitar. Carlos Drumont, probably would say that that smiling penedense had "moonlight mouth", re-heating his pretty poem. But he would lose his time, for the happy youngster already advances wooing:
- You have a moonlight mouth!
- What!?
- I said that you have a moonlight mouth!
- How’s that? What is this?
- It is because your teeth shine to the light of the moon! Ah...

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