Casa de santo, house of the saint, is the term for the ritual house in the Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Cuban religions, and it names both a physical compound and the religious family that inhabits it.
Compound and community
Like the terreiro of Candomble and the ile of Santeria, the casa de santo is at once a place and a people: the compound holding the shrines of the orixas or orishas and the rooms for initiation, and the community of initiates gathered around the presiding priest or priestess. The term reflects the syncretic naming by which the African deities were identified with Catholic saints under slavery, so that the house of the orixa is spoken of as the house of the saint, a usage that records the conditions under which these religions were forced to conceal themselves.
A shared form across the diaspora
That the same institution appears under different names, terreiro, ile, casa de santo, across Brazil and Cuba and their diasporas reflects a common structure inherited from West Africa and adapted to the Americas: the religion organised as an initiatory household under a priest, transmitting its knowledge through ritual kinship rather than through a public church. The casa de santo is thus one instance of a single diasporic pattern, and its persistence, through slavery, persecution and migration, rests on the same feature that sustained the others, that a religion housed in a home needs no sanction and can survive out of sight.
Sources Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian CandombleJ. Lorand Matory with Santeria Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban ReligionDavid H. Brown