Simple Rusticity in Coastal Trancoso, Brazil. In Brazil, near a village green lined with brightly painted cottages, T+L found coconut juice and caipirinhas, daily sun and nightly capoeira, and everyone’s- a- fisherman fashion. The first time I arrived in Trancoso, with my wife and three friends, we took the wrong road. Actually, it was sort of the right road, but it seemed entirely wrong at the time. Piloting our rental car through the dimming twilight, we turned off the highway at a sign marked Trancoso, whereupon the asphalt gave way to a rough dirt track. Whereupon a chunk of our muffler fell off. Whereupon it started to rain.
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Violently. Tracing the contours of a steep ravine, the road became a mud- slicked luge run, interrupted by potholes that could swallow a Volkswagen. Thick streams of red clay cascaded down the hill. For a moment we thought we’d mistaken a riverbed for the road, except that every so often we’d pass someone pushing a bicycle along the shoulder. Trancoso?” we shouted over the roar of our engine. Sim, sim,” they all replied, grinning and pointing dead ahead. I guess this is why Naomi Campbell takes the helicopter,” our friend Laura said between bumps.
Related: Brazil Travel Guide. After 4. 5 minutes of sloshing through a deluge of mud, at one point crossing a gully on a bridge of two- by- fours, then making a final wheel- spinning push uphill, we emerged, pioneer- like, in a clifftop village of single- story houses fringed with tamarind and cashew trees. The rain had finally stopped, and paper lanterns hanging from the branches were now being set alight. On the town green—which was just that, five acres of unkempt grass—a few dozen people were out for an evening stroll, sharing the green with three lazily grazing horses.“Jesus,” Alan murmured. We found Brigadoon.”Despite the complete absence of signage, we managed to find our hotel (there are only a few proper streets), where we recounted our misadventure to the desk clerk. So,” she replied.
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- The first time I arrived in Trancoso, with my wife and three friends, we took the wrong road. Actually, it was sort of the right road, but it seemed entirely wrong at.
Villas de Trancoso - Praia dos Nativos. Villas de Trancoso, um refúgio particular. Villas de Trancoso é um refúgio romântico localizado em uma das mais belas.
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Why didn’t you take the paved road?”The inland highway we’d turned off would have taken us straight into Trancoso. It was completed in 2. Which gives you an idea of what kind of place Trancoso is, and what sort of people wind up here.“Trancoso is where rich people from São Paulo go to pretend they’re poor,” jokes Eduardo Garcia, a painter from Rio de Janeiro. He’s right: in the past few years this historic Bahian village has become a retreat for wealthy Paulistas, who find in Trancoso’s simple rusticity a bizarro inversion of their own fashion- mad metropolis—a sort of antediluvian Rua Oscar Freire, an H. Stern diamond in the rough. But that’s not why you want to go.
You want to go to Trancoso because it is one of the strangest and most singularly beautiful places in Brazil. We fell hard for the town on that first visit, and ever since have found it impossible to shake from our heads, like some disturbingly vivid dream: Were we all on drugs? Did it really look like that? Last fall I returned to Trancoso—via the dirt road, of course—to find it all magically and improbably intact. Twelve miles north of here, near Porto Seguro, Pedro Álvares Cabral’s fleet came ashore in April 1. Europe’s first encounter with Brazil. Today this portion of southern Bahia is known as the Costa do Descobrimento, or Discovery Coast.
As melhores Pousadas em Trancoso na Bahia. Pousadas e Hotéis em Trancoso, no Quadrado de Trancoso, nas praias paradisíacas e no centro de Trancoso, Hotéis para lua.
Given the preponderance of fio dental—dental floss—bikinis, Uncovery Coast might be an apter name.) Along the shore runs an epic stretch of golden beach, much of it backed by nothing more than coconut palms and dendê trees and towering red- clay cliffs. Flying the length of the Discovery Coast in a helicopter takes 1. The coast has been rediscovered again and again since Cabral’s time.
Porto Seguro is now a Brazilian spring- break bastion, as its main drag, Passarela do Álcool (Catwalk of Alcohol), attests. Nearby Arraial d’Ajuda is a popular resort town.
Tucked off the road to Trancoso is the luxury residential development Terravista, home to Brazil’s best golf course and a Club Med. Amid these familiar holiday magnets, Trancoso has always stood apart. Electricity came only in 1.
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For most of its existence—from its founding by Jesuits in the 1. Eden in the 1. 97.
Until quite recently, barter, not cash, was the preferred means of exchange. According to legend, a large swath of one of the town’s beaches, Praia dos Nativos, was sold to a wily Brazilian playboy in exchange for a transistor radio and a set of dentures. The town is as remarkable for what it lacks (stoplights and well- functioning ATM’s) as it is for what it has (that stunning beach).
But it is the Quadrado—the grassy square at the heart of the village—that makes Trancoso unique. At one end stands the chalk- white Igreja de São João Batista, the second- oldest church in Brazil, built by Portuguese settlers in 1. Its defiantly plain façade—broken by a door, a window, and a wooden cross—is a fitting image for this place of uncomplicated pleasures. Behind the church, a 1,2. Atlantic. The Quadrado itself is used mainly for impromptu barefoot soccer games, though the players have to contend with the odd horse at half- field. Sixty squat houses, painted in brilliant hues from lime- green to lavender, frame the square.
In accordance with local laws, each is built from mud and clay, with plank doors, shuttered windows, and a palm- frond roof. Traditionally, none of the houses had numbers—locals knew them simply as “the pink one” or “the orange one.” Now most have been converted into artisans’ workshops, boutiques, and restaurants whose tables spill out onto the green, under the shade of gnarled trees laden with mangoes and almonds and jackfruit. My friends and I could never decide which was more stirring: the view of the Quadrado at night, illuminated by lanterns and moonlight and echoing with bossa nova and clinking glasses; or the same sight at midday, when the sun turns the rainbow façades to neon and the bushes buzz with hummingbirds (beija- flor, or “flower- kissers,” to Brazilians). In the heat of the afternoon, when most visitors are down at the beach, many of the shops are closed, leaving the Quadrado to the horses, the hippies who lay out handmade jewelry on blankets on the lawn, and Raimundo the coconut vendor, who sets up beside the church. With his machete he’ll slice off the top of the fruit, then pour the sweet juice through a cooler of ice and back into the coconut for you to drink. When the sun starts to descend, the beachgoers trickle back and the shops and restaurants throw open their wooden shutters.
Hours of operation are officially 4 p. As you read this, Trancoso is jumping. For three weeks in late December and early January, São Paulo society descends on the Quadrado, transforming the village into one big holiday bacchanal. It helps that Christmas and New Year’s usher in Brazilian summer.) Lines for restaurants snake around the corner, and parking requires some patience—this in a town where few locals own cars. Then, just as suddenly, influx turns exodus. For the rest of the year, Trancoso can seem all but deserted. Weekenders and honeymooners pass through during the long off- season, but not many.
When we visited in March the hotels were only a quarter full, and when I returned last fall I was one of maybe 1. In the curious ebb and flow of Trancoso, one month it’s um- cha- um- cha beats at a jam- packed beach bar, and the next it’s the gentle chirrup- chirrup of lizards on an empty Quadrado. At quieter times like those, one wonders what it must have been like a generation ago.
Rhapsodies about hippie- dropout meccas make me skeptical; one dude’s far- out fantasy is another’s dysfunctional cesspool. Still, imagine Trancoso in the early 1. Brazil and elsewhere—stumbled upon this remote Pataxó Indian village, where money was fish and fish were plentiful. The newcomers were called biribandos, a Pataxó term for “outsiders.” By most accounts, they fit in well with the villagers—even helping to restore the town church, which had languished in disrepair. Many original biribandos remain here, and are known mainly by their first names: Lia, Calé, Leila, Calá. That several of the ragtag escapees came from São Paulo families with prominent surnames is perhaps not unrelated.) A new generation of hippies manqué has followed in their footsteps: guys in untrimmed beards pushing strollers around the square, sun- drenched women with middle parts and beaded bikinis, teenage longhairs noodling on the berimbau or grooving on the cuíca, the Bahian percussion instrument that emits a squeak like a puppy whose tail was just stepped on.
One can always make out the tang of ganja smoke in the breezes wafting across the Quadrado. This may explain why one biribando is presently collecting insect wings in the hope of building a spaceship. After the hippies came other free spirits: painters, sculptors, dancers, musicians. The actress Sonia Braga visited frequently in the 1. Gal Costa. Her former summer house on Praia dos Nativos is now a Relais & Châteaux resort, Pousada Estrela d’Água (with the best bar on the beach).
Elba Ramalho, the high priestess of forró music, owned a local club called Bar Bossa, where she often took the stage. Since the turn of the millennium, another breed of biribando has arrived, landing private jets at the Terravista airstrip and flying choppers into town. The new wave uses not fish or dentures but actual money—a lot of it—to scoop up beachfront villas and rustic pieds- à- terre. Naomi, Eddie Vedder, and Gisele have joined the Quadrado promenade. Sig Bergamin, a Brazilian interior designer with an international clientele, and Olivier Baussan, founder of L’Occitane, both own property nearby.
With them came outposts of fabulous Brazilian boutiques like Lenny and Richards. Like Goa and Ibiza before it, Trancoso would seem to be at the tipping point between high freak and high fashion, hippies and hipsters.