  In the literature, the matchings between spacetimes have been most of the
times implicitly assumed to preserve some of the symmetries of the problem
involved. But no definition for this kind of matching was given until recently.
Loosely speaking, the matching hypersurface is restricted to be tangent to the
orbits of a desired local group of symmetries admitted at both sides of the
matching and thus admitted by the whole matched spacetime. This general
definition is shown to lead to conditions on the properties of the preserved
groups. First, the algebraic type of the preserved group must be kept at both
sides of the matching hypersurface. Secondly, the orthogonal transivity of
two-dimensional conformal (in particular isometry) groups is shown to be
preserved (in a way made precise below) on the matching hypersurface. This
result has in particular direct implications on the studies of axially
symmetric isolated bodies in equilibrium in General Relativity, by making up
the first condition that determines the suitability of convective interiors to
be matched to vacuum exteriors. The definition and most of the results
presented in this paper do not depend on the dimension of the manifolds
involved nor the signature of the metric, and their applicability to other
situations and other higher dimensional theories is manifest.
