  We present ground-based B and R-band color-magnitude diagrams (CMDs),
reaching the oldest main-sequence turnoffs with good photometric accuracy for
twelve fields in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). Our fields, located between
~1 and ~4 degrees from the center of the galaxy, are situated in different
parts of the SMC such as the "Wing'' area, and towards the West and South. In
this paper we perform a first analysis of the stellar content in our SMC fields
through comparison with theoretical isochrones and color functions (CFs). We
find that the underlying spheroidally distributed population is composed of
both intermediate-age and old stars and that its age composition does not show
strong galacto-centric gradients. The three fields situated toward the east, in
the Wing region, show very active current star formation. However, only in the
eastern field closest to the center do we find an enhancement of recent star
formation with respect to a constant SFR(t). The fields corresponding to the
western side of the SMC present a much less populated young MS, and the CF
analysis indicates that the SFR(t) greatly diminished around 2 Gyr ago in these
parts. Field smc0057, the closest to the center of the galaxy and located in
the southern part, shows recent star formation, while the rest of the southern
fields present few bright MS stars. The structure of the red clump in all the
CMDs is consistent with the large amount of intermediate-age stars inferred
from the CMDs and color functions. None of the SMC fields presented here are
dominated by old stellar populations, a fact that is in agreement with the lack
of a conspicuous horizontal branch in all these SMC CMDs. This could indicate
that a disk population is ruling over a possible old halo in all the observed
fields.
