Qualla: Ilha de Itamaracá

Ilha de Itamaracá: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wilfredor, CC0. Until 2008 the Queen of Ciranda worked as a school lunch lady. Maria Madalena Correia do Nascimento was born on Ilha de Itamaracá on 12 January 1944, took the stage name Lia de Itamaracá, recorded an album called A Rainha da Ciranda in 1977 and was paid nothing for it. Recognition came late and from outside: a producer named Beto Hees put her on the bill at the Abril Pro Rock festival in 1998, and her first CD followed four years after that. The island she carries in her name is a small one — sixty-six square kilometres of forest, mangrove and beach off the coast of Pernambuco — and it has been producing outsized history for five centuries.

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Image: Wilfredor | CC0

Ilha de Itamaracá: The Stone That Rattles

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cesimar Xavier, CC BY-SA 3.0. Itamaracá comes from Tupi: itá, stone, and mbara'ká, the rattle. Stone that rattles, or stone that sings, depending on who is translating. Two-thirds of the island remains under protected Atlantic forest, the Mata Atlântica that once ran unbroken down most of the Brazilian coast ...

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Image: Cesimar Xavier | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ilha de Itamaracá: The First Mill in Portuguese America

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit LeROc, CC BY-SA 4.0. A sugar mill was established on Itamaracá in 1516, the first in Portuguese America, and the settlement around it is counted as the oldest continuously inhabited Portuguese place in the hemisphere. A chapel dedicated to Nossa Senhora da Conceição was already functioning here by 15...

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Image: LeROc | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ilha de Itamaracá: A Book Printed in Hanau

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Johannes Vingboons, Public domain. The island is credited with one of the first Jewish communities in the Americas, and almost nothing physical survives to prove it. Almost. In the Yosef Goldman Collection there is a copy of Sefer Shefa Tal, a kabbalistic work printed in Hanau, Germany, in 1612. On its pages someo...

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Image: Johannes Vingboons | Public domain

Ilha de Itamaracá: The Circle on the Sand

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hans von Manteuffel, CC BY-SA 4.0. Ciranda was invented here, by the wives of fishermen waiting on the beach for the boats to come back. The dance is a wide ring of people holding hands, moving to a slow repeating rhythm that can absorb newcomers indefinitely; you join by taking two hands, and that is the whole en...

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Image: Hans von Manteuffel | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ilha de Itamaracá: The Leeward Side

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Itamaraca, CC BY-SA 4.0. Two things about Itamaracá rarely appear in the tourist material. The island holds a state prison complex, sited on the sheltered western side well away from the beaches — prisons were put on islands here, as elsewhere, on the assumption that most people could not swim. A long-ru...

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Image: Itamaraca | CC BY-SA 4.0