Roots of Bahia

Brazil’s greatest storyteller, Jorge Amado, set his novels here, in a port town that cacao made rich and reckless. You land, drop your bags, and walk straight into his pages: the writer’s own house, the pastel palaces of the cacao barons, the São Sebastião cathedral, and the Bataclan, the infamous cabaret his characters could never stay away from.

Late afternoon, you trade the city for the interior. The road south climbs to the finest viewpoint on the whole coast, where you stop as the light goes gold, then drops you in Taboquinhas, a cacao village on the banks of the broad Rio de Contas. Dinner is by the river. The week has begun.

North to the Baía de Camamu, and then off the map: a fishing village you can only reach by sand track or by boat, raised on a bluff above the mangrove forest, where families live from the sea and the piaçava palm. A canoeiro takes you out into the green maze. He pulls oysters from the roots as you go, and on a small island he builds a fire and roasts them, right there, minutes old.

Back in the village square, lunch is catado de siri, picked crab that many will tell you is the best in Brazil, and they may be right. In the afternoon you roll south through the restinga scrubland until the trees open onto something absurd: a working farm sitting alone in the middle of a twenty-kilometre beach. That is where you sleep.

One last swim, then inland to Jatimane, a quilombo, a community founded by people who freed themselves from slavery and never left. In the biojoias workshop you watch the hard nut of the piaçava palm become jewellery, and if you stay for lunch, you eat what the community cooks for itself.

In the afternoon a red-dirt road carries you to an organic farm where a handful of families live off-grid, building with earth, farming without chemicals, and keeping the old crafts alive. When night falls, the berimbau comes out. Learn to string and play it, or step into the circle and learn your first capoeira moves, by firelight, from people who grew up inside this art.