Ilhéus

Ilhéus began in 1534 as São Jorge dos Ilhéus, the seat of one of the hereditary captaincies into which the Portuguese crown divided Brazil, granted to Jorge de Figueiredo Correia. The first settlers planted sugar and clashed with the Tupiniquim, who rose against the grant; Mem de Sá's violent repression ended in the Battle of the Swimmers on the beach at Cururupe, one of the founding events of the region. For two centuries the town remained small and poor, a minor port overshadowed by Salvador, with a church of São Jorge from the 1500s as its chief monument.

Cocoa changed everything. First planted at Ilhéus in 1752, the crop found its ideal home in the humid forests behind the coast, and in the 19th century land grants for cocoa drew migrants from Sergipe and drought refugees from the sertão to clear land and plant. The coronéis do cacau, the cocoa colonels, built fortunes and mansions, fought over land with gunmen, and gave Ilhéus mansions, a port begun in 1924, a cathedral begun in the early 1930s, cabarets, casinos and the bars that Jorge Amado — who spent his childhood in the city — immortalised in Terras do Sem-Fim and Gabriela, Cravo e Canela.

The boom ran out after 1989, when the witches' broom fungus reached the region and within little more than a decade had spread to almost all the plantations, cutting production drastically, ruining farmers and emptying the countryside. The city turned to the port, the state university shared with Itabuna, and tourism built on the beaches and the Amado connection. A slow recovery through resistant cloned trees and fine chocolate has given cocoa a second, smaller life.

Ilhéus is Jorge Amado's city. The novelist, born in 1912 on a farm in Ferradas, then part of Ilhéus, set his early books among the colonels, gunmen and migrants of the cocoa boom, and Gabriela, Cravo e Canela, his 1958 novel of a cook and a bar owner in the Ilhéus of the 1920s, made the Bar Vesúvio, the Bataclan cabaret and the cathedral square known across Brazil and beyond through its television adaptations. The city trades on the connection with a house museum and signs marking the novels' locations, and residents take an easy pride in it.

The wider culture is that of the Bahian coast: Catholic feasts and Candomblé, capoeira on the beaches, forró and axé in the bars at Carnival, and a strong Afro-Brazilian presence inherited from the plantations. The Tupinambá de Olivença, whose territory south of the city was declared Indigenous land of permanent Tupinambá possession in November 2025, keep their own ceremonies, crafts and a long memory of the colonial wars, and their struggle is part of the region's present as much as its past.

Cocoa shapes identity too. The cacau civilisation of farms, colonels and migrants is remembered in museums and farm tours, and the region's reinvention as a producer of fine chocolate has given the city a new generation of small makers. Football is followed through the big Bahian clubs, and the evening promenade along the seafront is the city's shared ritual.

About 180,000 people live in the municipality, which stretches along the coast and far into the cocoa forest. The centre, the seafront districts and Pontal hold the middle-class apartment blocks and the hotels; the hillsides and outer districts to the north and west hold poorer neighbourhoods that grew with the migrations of the boom and the flight from the countryside after the fungus struck. Itabuna, about 25 km inland, is the larger commercial city, and the two form a single urban region with the state university, UESC, on the road between them.

The economy rests on the port, which ships cocoa and other goods, on public services and the university, on trade and on tourism. Cocoa remains important even at a fraction of its old volume — in 2020 Ilhéus produced more than any other municipality in Bahia — with a growing trade in beans for fine chocolate. Unemployment and informal work are high, as elsewhere in the north-east.

The day begins early and slows in the heat of the afternoon. Lunch is the main meal, often at a per-kilo buffet, and the seafront fills in the evening with walkers, footballers and families at the kiosks. Weekends mean the southern beaches. Housing on the hillsides, sanitation and crime in the outer districts are the issues that run through local politics.

Cocoa gives Ilhéus a table unlike the rest of Bahia. The fresh pulp of the fruit is pressed into a sweet, sharp juice, fermented into a liqueur or boiled down into mel de cacau, cocoa honey, which appears in sauces and desserts; and the chocolate made from the region's beans, from bars to hot chocolate and brigadeiros, is sold in cafés and shops in the centre and on the farms. Moqueca and bobó de camarão are the restaurant standards, as everywhere on the coast, and fish, shrimp and crab come from the bay and the rivers.

Street food follows Salvador: acarajé fried in dendê and filled with vatapá and shrimp from the baianas' trays in the squares, tapioca pancakes, and pastéis. The beach bars at Milionários and the southern beaches serve fried whole fish with farofa and rice, grilled lobster in season and coconut water from the groves behind the sand.

Drink is cold beer, caipirinhas with local fruit, and in the historic centre the Bar Vesúvio, which has served since 1919 and lives on the Gabriela trade. The cocoa region's sweets — cocoa-pulp jam, chocolate with Brazil nut or cupuaçu — make the usual gifts to take home.