W MAGAZINE
“During the past few years, Trancoso has made its name as one of the so-called hippie-chic hot spots, those 21st-century answers to Goa or Bali that are luring in-the-know jetsetters. Many such places never manage to get either the “hippie” or the “chic” part quite right, but Trancoso scores high on both counts. Founded in 1586 by Portuguese missionaries, who built a quaint Catholic church and then moved on, the town remained contentedly off the grid until about 1970, when a small group of biribandos—young counterculture types fleeing Brazil’s urban jungles for the real thing—showed up. Settling into the empty fishermen’s houses around the grass-covered Quadrado, a five-acre town square that overlooks the ocean, the biribandos mixed with local families in a barter-based collective, living off the land and the ocean. It was only in 1982 that electricity arrived, and not until almost two decades later that the latest wave of outsiders—fashionable São Paulo weekenders—rolled into town. Although the influx seemed likely to swallow the village whole, Trancoso has so far retained its unique brand of mellow charm, striking an ideal balance between the scruffy and the superfabulous.”