The village is older than the airstrip by four centuries. Jesuits came ashore here in late December 1549 with three ships, and work on the Igreja de Nossa Senhora d'Ajuda, Our Lady of Help, began the following year, in 1550. The building you see today is not that first church; the present structure dates from 1772, whitewashed and squat on the highest ground in the village, facing out over the drop to the sea. The settlement was originally Arraial de Nossa Senhora d'Ajuda, the hamlet of Our Lady of Help, and the shortened modern name still carries her in it. The church remains a working pilgrimage site rather than a photo stop. Every year between 6 and 15 August, processions climb the hill and fill a street otherwise given over to caipirinhas and beach hire.

Arraial sits on a plateau with the Atlantic Forest and mangrove at its back and a bluff dropping to the sand in front, and each of its beaches has its own temperament. Mucugê is the tame one, sheltered enough that the reef traps warm pools at low tide, and it carries the Eco Parque water park at its northern end. Pitinga is the postcard: fine soft sand, red-earth cliffs behind, the beach most likely to end up on somebody's phone wallpaper. Taípe is the wild one, open ocean with cliffs standing up to twenty metres above the tideline and no shelter at all from what the Atlantic sends in. The walk from one to the next along the sand is the standard way to spend an Arraial afternoon, and the tide decides whether you get to finish it.

Everything commercial funnels into one street. Rua do Mucugê runs from the church down toward the beach, and the town bills it, without any visible embarrassment, as the most charming street in Brazil. It is a strip of restaurants, bars, galleries and craft stalls that stays quiet through the heat of the day and then fills after dark, when tables spill across the paving and the sound of several different kitchens and sound systems arrives at once. Tourism is not one industry among several here; it is the district's economy, more or less entire. That gives Arraial its energy in high season and its slightly emptied-out quality in the low months, when the same street belongs to the people who actually live on it.

Arraial d'Ajuda is not a town in its own right. It is a district of the municipality of Porto Seguro, and the two are separated by the mouth of the Buranhém River, crossed by a ferry that carries the BA-986 state road and everything on it. The crossing takes minutes and functions as a filter: the noise, the airport and the cruise-ship crowds stay on the north bank, while the south bank keeps a village scale it has fought to hold on to. It has not entirely held. The 2010 census recorded 16,997 residents; by 2022 the figure was 25,157, spread across 9,142 occupied homes. A place that once needed its own airfield now runs on a boat, and on the far side of the water, where a runway used to be, children play football in the park.