Fernando de Noronha

The archipelago was sighted by the earliest European navigators, and an island much like it appears on the Cantino map of 1502. The written record dates its discovery to 10 August 1503, when a Portuguese expedition under Gonçalo Coelho lost its flagship on a reef nearby and Amerigo Vespucci spent a week ashore. King Manuel I granted the island as a hereditary captaincy to Fernão de Loronha, the Lisbon merchant who financed the voyage, and for a few years it served as the collection point for brazilwood gathered along the mainland coast. His name, misspelt, displaced the official name of São João.

Other powers came and went. The Dutch held the island in the 17th century, and the French East India Company tried to colonise it in 1736, until a Portuguese expedition from Recife expelled them. Portugal then fortified the island with a chain of forts, founded the town of Nossa Senhora dos Remédios in 1737 and turned the island into a prison. Trees were cut down so that prisoners could neither hide nor build rafts. Charles Darwin landed briefly from HMS Beagle in 1832.

In the 20th century the prison held political prisoners, and in 1942 the islands became a federal territory; the United States built an airport for the wartime air route between Natal and Dakar. After the 1964 coup the deposed governor of Pernambuco, Miguel Arraes, was held here. In 1988 most of the archipelago became a marine national park and the islands were joined to Pernambuco, and in 2001 UNESCO listed them, with Rocas Atoll, as a World Heritage Site.

The islanders are, in the words of Brazil's statistics institute, a population left by the island's many periods: descendants of common and political prisoners, guards and soldiers, of people posted here for work, and of newcomers who arrived for tourism and stayed. That mixture gives Noronha a small-town, mainland-Pernambuco character with a strong sense of being apart, reinforced by the island's own time zone, an hour ahead of the mainland coast.

The fortified past is the island's heritage. In 2017 Brazil's heritage institute, IPHAN, protected the historic ensemble as national cultural heritage — the forts, the town of Vila dos Remédios, the village of Quixaba, the fishermen's chapel of São Pedro and the old Air France building from the days of transatlantic mail flights. The Baroque church of Nossa Senhora dos Remédios, built with the fort, is the centre of the village.

The natural world shapes daily customs more than any tradition. Visitors and residents live under the rules of the national park and the environmental protection area: limits on numbers, bookings for the most fragile pools and trails, guides on some paths, and night closures of some beaches for part of the year. Diving, snorkelling and surfing are the island's shared pastimes, and the remote location even draws amateur radio operators, who count the archipelago as a separate entity to contact.

Only the main island is inhabited, with 3,167 people at the 2022 census. The archipelago is a state district administered directly by the government of Pernambuco rather than a normal municipality, and its jurisdiction also takes in the distant Saint Peter and Saint Paul rocks.

Tourism is the economy — dolphin watching, diving, charter fishing, guesthouses, buggies and boats — and it is deliberately restricted by the limits of a fragile ecosystem with scarce fresh water. The island has its own environmental problems: introduced species threaten its wildlife: tegu lizards, released in the 1950s to control rats, now feed mostly on bird eggs, feral cats prey on native birds, and rock cavies were brought in by the military in the 1960s.

Energy has long come from a fuel-burning power plant. In November 2025 the archipelago's first floating solar plant was opened on the Xaréu reservoir, and a larger solar and battery project, Noronha Verde, aims to make Fernando de Noronha the first inhabited oceanic island in Latin America to run entirely on sustainable energy. Daily life follows the sea and the light: early starts for dives and boat trips, afternoons on the beaches, and evenings gathered at the lookouts for the sunset.

Eating on Noronha is shaped by distance from the mainland, which makes it expensive, and by the sea around it. Seafood dominates restaurant menus: grilled fish, shellfish, and moquecas, the Brazilian fish stews cooked in a clay pot. Grilled picanha, the prized Brazilian cut of beef, is a steakhouse staple here as on the mainland, and Italian and sushi menus have followed the visitors.

The everyday option is the self-service buffet, where food is paid for by weight — the cheapest way to eat well, and a common lunch for residents and visitors alike. Many of these buffets serve both lunch and dinner, with rice, beans, salads, grilled meat and fish.

After a morning of diving, the island habit is a bowl of açaí at the port: the thick, cold, dark purple pulp of an Amazonian palm fruit, topped with granola and sliced banana. Tropical fruit juices, coconut water and cold beer are the drinks of the beaches, and the caipirinha, made with cachaça, lime and sugar, is the drink of the sunset.