Sitting on an idyllic stretch of Brazil’s Costa del Descubrimiento, a former Jesuit missionary town has become ‘the chicest place you’ve never heard of ’
Some 12 miles north of here, in the year 1500, Pedro Alvares Cabral became the first European to set foot in what would become the largest country of South America, and claimed it for the Portuguese crown. For the best part of a century thereafter, nothing much happened. Then, in 1586, the Jesuits arrived with missionary zeal, to create, unwittingly, what has since been dubbed the chicest place you have never heard of; haunt of European nobility, Hollywood aristocracy, and fashion royalty, nestling in the middle of nowhere.
The place is Trancoso, in the Brazilian state of Bahia. Sitting on an idyllic stretch of the Costa del Descubrimiento, it presented a challenge to the Jesuits, who found only mangroves and thick littoral forest inhabited by indigenous tribes. Intent on saving souls, they hacked their way through the jungle to create a five-acre, 300-metre-long rectangular green above a cliff face, known as the Quadrado. On each of the long sides of the rectangle, they built little houses of adobe-like pau-a-pique with wood shingle roofs. At the far end of the Quadrado, perched above the cliff and silhouetted against an azure ocean, they erected the little whitewashed church of São João Batista, one of the oldest churches in Brazil. Sunday services are still held here – the focal point and heart of the historic town.
By the time hippies in search of an alternative lifestyle discovered Trancoso in the early 1970s, only some 300 nativos – mainly fishermen – lived in the village. There was no electricity (until 1982) or roads (until 2002) – just the kind of idyll the newcomers were looking for. The biribandos, as the hippies were known, interacted with the locals and began to purchase land.