Terras de São José I

History

The story begins at a road-engineering table. Senpari, founded in 1963 by engineer Jacob Federmann and consolidated in 1967 with the arrival of Dr. Rosaldo Malucelli, built and maintained motorways — Castello Branco, Anhanguera, Bandeirantes, Dom Pedro — when the partners decided to diversify. They found, on an area of 4.2 million square metres belonging to the Patrocínio nuns, in Itui, the land for an idea that did not yet exist in the country. According to the group’s own account, they travelled to Boca Raton, Palm Beach, Naples and southern Spain to study residential leisure centres near large cities, and came back with a finding: abroad, each development was built around a single sport — tennis, or golf, or equestrianism, or sailing. The decision was to bring them all together under one address.

The title of “first gated community in Brazil” is claimed by Grupo Senpar Terras de São José in its own institutional material, and it is only fair to note that the group is not consistent about the date: the developments page says it all began in 1972 and that the project was born in 1973; the corporate timeline marks 1974; and the condominium administration’s website states that “in 1975 the first urban residential development in Brazil was created”. This entry does not choose on its own — what is certain is that the project was conceived in the early 1970s and implemented in the middle of that decade, and that the golf course opened in 1977. The municipal road serving the area now bears the founder’s name: Estrada Municipal do Pinheirinho Doutor Jacob Federmann.

• Concept: a single gated address with every field sport at once — golf, equestrianism, tennis, football — within a woodland reserve, an hour from São Paulo.
• Trivia: the Terras de São José Golfe Clubei was one of the country’s first courses inside a condominium and a Brazilian pioneer of the semi-public concept, open to non-members; it was twice voted one of Brazil’s ten best courses by Golf Digest. The condominium runs its own bird-release programme, with over five hundred birds of various species returned to the woodland.

Architecture and aesthetics

Terras de São José has no façade: it has site implementation. The plots are sold for custom construction, and what gives the ensemble its unity is not a single design but the topography — freestanding houses on generous plots, spread across 175 alqueires of native woodland, with the golf course working as landscaping on a territorial scale. The 650,000 m² of the eighteen-hole course, designed by Ricardo Rodolfo Rossi and Emilio Serra, cross the development and form the view from most of the residences; wide fairways, small greens, lakes and native vegetation. The development’s master plan is not publicly documented with authorship and, for that reason, is not attributed here. It is a half-century-old address: some of the houses date from the 1970s and 1980s and carry that generation’s country-house language, some are contemporary rebuilds on old plots — and that layering of different eras is, in itself, the character of the place.

Aesthetics and scarcity

Technical specifications

• Towers and units: not a tower. It is a gated development with 995 plots, of which around 700 are already built on, across 175 alqueires — approximately 4.2 million m².
• Sizes: here the size that matters is that of the plot, not the slab: the houses are custom-built and vary with each owner’s design. The archive does not record a confirmed-source minimum plot size.
• Parking: according to the house and the design.
• Structural highlights: own eighteen-hole golf course occupying 650,000 m²; equestrian centre with fifty stalls; licensed helipad within the development; hotel and school adjoining the perimeter; 24-hour security.
• Registry and parameters: gated development in Itu/SP, outside the fiscal-plot mesh, zoning and buildable ratio of the São Paulo municipal survey. Postcode 13306-385 belongs to the condominium itself, and the internal lanes have their own postcodes — a registry sign of a perimeter consolidated for decades.

Leisure and facilities

• 18-hole golf course, par 72 (Terras de São José Golfe Clubei)
• Equestrian centre with 50 stalls
• 20 tennis courts
• 3 football pitches
• Multi-sports court
• 2 beach volleyball courts
• Jogging track
• Chapel
• Helipad
• Restaurant, snack bars and convenience shop
• 24-hour security

Location and surroundings

Points of interest · distances in metres

Itu: the address

Itui is not a neighbourhood: it is the historic city just over a hundred kilometres west of the capital, on the Rodovia Castello Brancoi axis, with local access via the Rodovia Waldomiro Corrêa de Camargoi — the old Sugar Road, whose name carries the crop that made the region in the nineteenth century. It was there that the 1873 republican convention was signed, and it is from there that the city’s reputation for exaggeration comes, the giant replicas that Itu’s residents turned into an identity. What matters to this address, though, is pure geography: Itu is less than an hour from the Faria Lima office and twenty minutes from Sorocaba, has one of the mildest climates in the state and gathers, within a radius of a few kilometres, the highest concentration of gated country developments in the country — they were born here, and born early. The municipality is the birthplace of the formula that later spread across Brazil: wall, gatehouse, club and large plot, an hour from the metropolis.