The land was granted to Pedro Homem da Costa on 16 September 1621. He put up a chapel to Nossa Senhora de Guadalupe, who remains the city's patroness and gives her name to its cathedral, and the settlement took the name Estância — a Portuguese word borrowed from Spanish colonial usage for a cattle-raising property. It took two more centuries to become a town in law: independent standing on 25 October 1831, city status on 4 May 1848. By then the estância of the name had long since been overtaken by sugar, and the place had money.

Estância's nineteenth-century prosperity came out of the sugar mills, and the mills ran on enslaved African labour. The town's African cultural inheritance — its music, its food, its religious life — arrived with people who were brought here to work the engenhos and had no say in coming. Portuguese immigrants from the north of Portugal settled here too, along with some Galicians from Spain. The wealth that produced those tiled facades was built by all of them, and only some of them were paid for it.

What survives from the boom is architecture. Estância holds an unusual concentration of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings, and the azulejo facades — imported Portuguese ceramic tile applied across whole housefronts — are what set the streetscape apart from anywhere else in Sergipe. IPHAN listed the house at Praça Rio Branco nº 35 as a federal heritage site on 27 July 1962. The state has listed eight houses on Rua Capitão Salomão and one on Rua Duque de Caxias. Protection has not always meant preservation: one listed property lost its portico to a metal grating and had its ground floor gutted. An oil painting by Horácio Hora, Misericórdia e Caridade, hanging in the Hospital Amparo de Maria, is listed as well. Walk Rua Capitão Salomão and you can read the whole story off the walls — the ambition, and the century of deferred maintenance that followed it.

Estância sits inland of its own coastline, sixty-six kilometres south of Aracaju on the BA–SE stretch of the BR-101, with the Rio Piauí and the Rio Piauitinga draining the municipality toward the Atlantic. The Linha Verde, an ecological coastal road protected by IBAMA, runs past on its way from Salvador to Aracaju. Praia do Saco is the town's beach. Schooners work the riverbanks for sightseers, and from Porto do Saco do Rio Real — Porto do Mato — a passenger boat crosses into Bahia to Mangue Seco, which is close enough that the two places share a river and not much else. The port of Sergipe, the Inácio Barbosa Maritime Terminal at Barra dos Coqueiros, lies eighty kilometres away.

The calendar peaks in June, when the traditional festas juninas fill the streets — the São João season that the Brazilian northeast treats with roughly the seriousness other countries reserve for Christmas. The rest of the year is warm and reliably so, with daily temperatures running between 24 and 32 degrees; the wet stretch runs May through September and the heat peaks in December, January and March. About sixty-five thousand people live here, making Estância the sixth-largest municipality in Sergipe and its third-largest economy after Aracaju and Nossa Senhora do Socorro, as well as the state's second industrial centre and the seat of a Catholic diocese covering sixteen municipalities. It is no longer the second city of Sergipe, as it was in the mid-twentieth century. The tiles remember when it was.