Qualla: Alagoas

Alagoas: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Alagoas is nicknamed Terra dos Marechais, Land of the Marshals, because Brazil's first two presidents were both born here — Deodoro da Fonseca, who proclaimed the republic in 1889, and Floriano Peixoto, who followed him. It is a peculiar distinction for a place this small. Alagoas is the second-smallest state in Brazil, larger only than neighbouring Sergipe, with 27,845 square kilometres of coast, lagoon and cane field. The same hills also held Palmares, the community of self-liberated people that Portugal spent most of the seventeenth century failing to destroy. Small states can carry a great deal of history.

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Alagoas: The Southern Edge of the Sugar

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For nearly three hundred years Alagoas was not a place in its own right — it was the southern end of the Captaincy of Pernambuco, opened up because the sugar economy on the coast needed new ground to plant. The settlements that anchored that push, Porto Calvo and Penedo and the t...

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Alagoas: The Dutch, and What Came of Them

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Dutch invasion of Pernambuco reached Alagoas in 1631 and lasted until 1645, when hard fighting at Porto Calvo drove the invaders out and left the local economy wrecked. The war had another consequence the planters had not planned for. In the confusion, large numbers of enslav...

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Alagoas: Delmiro Gouveia's Factory

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At the start of the twentieth century a Pernambucan entrepreneur named Delmiro Gouveia tried something almost nobody in the sertão had attempted: industry, powered by the São Francisco. His Estrela thread factory came to turn out more than 500,000 spools a day in the dry interior...

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Alagoas: Cane, Coast and Hard Numbers

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Alagoas holds about 1.6 percent of Brazil's people — 3,127,683 at the 2022 census, across 102 municipalities — and produces around 0.8 percent of its GDP. It remains one of the country's poorest states, ranking twenty-sixth of twenty-seven on the human development index, though t...

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Alagoas: What It Sends Out Into Brazil

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For a small, poor state Alagoas has an outsized cultural export record. Graciliano Ramos, whose novels remain the hardest and clearest writing anyone has done about the Northeast, came from here, and so did the poets Jorge de Lima and Lêdo Ivo, and Aurélio Buarque de Holanda, who...

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