front of the property of Francisco Arruda da Costa, suggests that the remains of the small castelinho, supports many of the early descriptions. The small fort would, originally, have been situated over the clifftop walls over the coast, which were common to early island forts. The military redoubt, constructed in the 16th-17th century (with its first repair in 1643) was an important bastion in the defense of the zone, and one of the oldest populated spaces. It was Bishop D. Pedro de Castilho, Bishop of Angra who determined the creation of a third parish in Ponta Delgada. Reference to the new ecumenical parish date to this period: ...the third parish, newly made, in Santa Clara, before being expanded, had 62 homes, with 297 confessed souls, of whom there was almost 203 who had taken communion. In 1581, D. Pedro de Castilho, visited the hermitage in Santa Clara, insisting on a baptismal font for the new parish, and owing expanding the parishes borders towards the east. The ecumenical parish of Santa Clara persisted during prelature of Bishop Gaspar de Faria, with its seat in the hermitage of its invocation (which already existed prior to 1522, when the earthquake caused major upheavals). But, following the first quarter of the 17th century, the parish of Santa Clara changed its denomination to São José (encompassing a larger part of Ponta Delgada as the bishop had envisioned), and the original hermitage in the zone subsisted with a single member of the curia. With the accompanying settlement of the territory, agriculture and fishing became a dominant part of the settlement in the region. By the beginning of the first quarter of the 20th century, there continued to operate windmills and milling stones in the lowlands, to catch the wind and support the pasturelands. The great change came with the transformation caused by the construction of the artificial port of Ponta Delgada, at the end of 1861, resulting in the migration of stonemasons and construction workers, along with their families to the coastal zone. Santa Clara, then primarily a fishing community, began to become a neighbourhood of poor workers. Between the 19th and 20th century, now with the port functioning, the locality continued to attract workers due to the implantation of industrial companies. The road to revive Santa Clara from a small village locality into a civil parish began with Father Fernando Vieira Gomes“de Santa Clara”, who