Nowhere else in Asia does a Portuguese Baroque city sit intact beside the world’s most concentrated casino economy, and Walking Expedition’s 4K tour of the Macau walking tour historic centre captures that extraordinary contrast in a single, unhurried walk. The video moves through the UNESCO-listed Historic Centre of Macao — from the black-and-white Portuguese-tile cobblestones leading up to the iconic façade of St Paul’s, through the pastel-painted squares, Baroque churches, and colonnaded civic buildings that constitute the most complete Portuguese colonial streetscape surviving anywhere in Asia — before the modern towers of Cotai rise on the horizon as a reminder of the city’s other, glittering identity.
About This Walking Tour
Walking Expedition’s tour opens at Senado Square — the elliptical piazza whose wavy black-and-white mosaic paving is among the most recognisable public spaces in Asia — and establishes immediately the visual logic of the historic centre: Portuguese civic architecture and Chinese signage in a seamless, four-century synthesis. From the square, the camera follows the pilgrimage route north through Rua da Palha and Rua de São Paulo to the foot of the great stone steps leading to the Ruins of St Paul’s, the façade of the Jesuit church that burned in 1835, leaving its elaborately carved stone front standing alone as one of the most dramatic architectural relics in the world. The bas-reliefs on the façade — a crucifixion, a skeleton, a Portuguese galleon, and the Virgin trampling a seven-headed hydra — tell the story of the Jesuit mission to China and Japan with an intensity that rewards close study, and the video camera allows that study. Beyond St Paul’s, the Monte Fortress provides a panoramic viewing platform over the entire historic peninsula. The tour also captures the A-Ma Temple at the southern tip — the Taoist shrine from which, according to tradition, the Portuguese derived the name Macau — completing a circuit of the city’s 22 UNESCO-listed heritage monuments.
Highlights of Macau
The Ruins of St Paul’s — technically the façade and crypt of the Church of Mater Dei, completed by Jesuit priests and Japanese Christian exiles in 1640 and destroyed by fire in 1835 — is the defining image of Macau, a structure as much symbol as architecture. Senado Square’s beautifully maintained colonial buildings house the Leal Senado (the historic civic chamber) and several museums that document the city’s four-century Sino-Portuguese history. The Lou Kau Mansion, a late nineteenth-century Chinese merchant’s house tucked behind Senado Square, exemplifies the Macanese architectural synthesis: a Chinese courtyard house decorated with Portuguese azulejo tiles and Baroque plasterwork. The A-Ma Temple, dedicated to the sea goddess Mazu and at least 600 years old, is the spiritual anchor of the southern peninsula and the oldest surviving structure in the city. St Lazarus neighbourhood, a short walk from Senado Square, is the city’s arts district — a cluster of pastel-painted colonial villas converted into galleries, studios, and cafés where the weekend atmosphere is relaxed and the architecture photogenic.
A Brief History of Macau
Macau became a Portuguese trading post in 1557, when the Ming dynasty permitted Portuguese merchants to settle in exchange for suppressing piracy in the Pearl River Delta — making it the first permanent European settlement on the Chinese coast, nearly three centuries before Hong Kong. At its peak in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Macau controlled the trade routes between China, Japan, and Goa, and its merchants grew fabulously wealthy. The Jesuit missionaries who operated from Macau attempted to carry Christianity into China and Japan; St Paul’s Church and its attached college were the headquarters of this enterprise. Macau gradually declined as a trade centre during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Canton (Guangzhou) became the dominant port. It returned to Chinese sovereignty as a Special Administrative Region in December 1999, 442 years after the Portuguese first settled there. Today, gaming revenues that surpassed Las Vegas in 2006 have funded a construction boom on the Cotai strip while, paradoxically, also financing the conservation of the historic centre through tax revenues.
Practical Tips
High-speed ferries from Hong Kong take approximately 60 minutes to the Macau Outer Harbour Terminal; a newer terminal at Taipa serves Cotai. From either terminal, free shuttle buses operated by the major hotels connect to the historic centre. The UNESCO circuit is compact — the main walking loop from Senado Square to St Paul’s and back covers about two kilometres — and the terrain is mostly flat with one short, steep climb to Monte Fortress. Visit on a weekday morning to avoid the heaviest tour-group traffic; weekends and public holidays bring large crowds to St Paul’s steps. The beef jerky stalls on Rua da Felicidade near Senado Square are a legitimate Macanese street food experience that the video also passes through.
Watch & Explore More
The Portuguese colonial story connects Macau directly to our Goa Panjim and Fontainhas walking tour, where another surviving slice of Portuguese Asia waits to be explored. For the energy of the wider Pearl River Delta, our Hong Kong Central and Kowloon tour is just a ferry ride away. Subscribe to @walkingtoursvideoscom for new walking tour films every week.