Itacaré

Itacaré sits where the Atlantic Forest reaches the water, and the municipality explains why: a geological formation unique in the Brazilian Northeast, a coastal strip of fertile soil and rock cliffs that lets the trees come all the way down. Behind them the Serra do Conduru park counts about 458 tree species per hectare, one of the highest figures recorded anywhere. The name is Old Tupi, ita and iakare, stone caiman.

The forest here survived because of what was planted under it. Cacao here is grown cabruca, under the shade of the standing Atlantic Forest, and the municipality's own account is blunt about the consequence: sugar or coffee would have needed the canopy cleared, and cacao did not. The town grew rich on it between 1890 and 1940, then the harbour silted up, the roads were bad, and Itacaré spent most of the twentieth century cut off, until the Estrada Parque da Serra between Ilhéus and Itacaré opened in 1998, which the municipality calls the first genuinely ecological road built in Brazil. Southern Bahian cacao once accounted for ninety per cent of everything Brazil produced; it collapsed at the close of the 1980s and came back as fine cacao, and in 2018 INPI registered Sul da Bahia as a protected origin for cacao beans, Itacaré among its municipalities. What tourism found when the road opened was a coast of beaches with thirty river headwaters behind it, and the town now takes over nine tenths of its income from that.