Trancoso
"The Quadrado at sunset — beauty so specific and so complete it is almost unfair to other places."
Trancoso is forty-five minutes south of Porto Seguro by road, and the drive passes through scrubby Mata Atlântica on a road that feels improvised until suddenly it is not. The village appears with no preamble: a cliff, a church, a square, and below the cliff a long beach of absolute quality. The Quadrado — the central square — is the organizing fact of Trancoso, and it is one of those rare public spaces that exists in perfect equilibrium. Grassy, long, fringed by low colonial houses painted in colors that range from faded ochre to vivid turquoise. At one end: the Igreja de São João Batista, the tiniest white church, dating to 1656. At the other end: the Atlantic, visible through a grove of palms at the edge of the cliff.
The houses around the Quadrado are a mixture of simple residential dwellings, expensive boutique shops, and restaurants where the price point signals that Trancoso long ago crossed from backpacker enclave to international luxury destination. This transition happened in stages from the 1970s to the 2000s and is now complete. Brazilian fashion designers have houses here. Italian architects. A former French president. There is a whole stratum of the very wealthy who quietly summer in Trancoso in a way that involves very little conspicuous display. The restaurants on the Quadrado have tablecloths but no menus in windows; you have to push the door and look. I pushed a few doors I should not have.
The beaches below the cliff — Praia dos Nativos, Praia do Rio Verde — are the ones people mean when they talk about discovering untouched Brazilian coastline, though they are not especially untouched by now. They are, however, genuinely magnificent: wide, clean, with dark sand that holds the heat into the evening, and the surf coming in at an angle that creates long rides for those inclined to bodysurf. I am so inclined, and I spent two afternoons reading the break and getting thrown sideways by waves that were less forgiving than they looked.
The food in Trancoso runs the full spectrum from beachside açaí bowls to multi-course dinners pairing Bahian ingredients with techniques borrowed from European fine dining. I ate at both ends and found the açaí bowl more satisfying. There is a fish restaurant behind the Quadrado — no sign, just a door open and a handwritten menu on a chalkboard — that serves a grilled robalo (snook) that I think about when I am not sleeping.
When to go: December through February is high season and reservations are essential weeks in advance. May through September is the quiet season — the Quadrado empties of fashion people and fills with Brazilian families on long weekends, which is a better crowd to spend time with. The beaches are best April through September when the swell direction is most favorable.