Qualla: Mazagão Velho

Mazagão Velho: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Portuguese crown gave up on Mazagão in the spring of 1769. The fortified town on the Moroccan coast had been held for more than two centuries, and on 10 March that year, by order of King José I, the citadel was formally deactivated and its people put aboard ships. Most of them never saw Portugal again. They were carried across the Atlantic to the mouth of the Amazon, and then upriver into the rainforest, where a town was laid out to hold them. Every July, in that town, their descendants stage the war they were evacuated from.

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Mazagão Velho: Evacuation Order

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Mazagão had been a Portuguese outpost on the Atlantic coast of Morocco since the sixteenth century, a walled Christian garrison under steady military pressure from the surrounding Muslim states. When Lisbon finally abandoned it, 2,092 inhabitants were resettled, and 1,855 of them...

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Mazagão Velho: A Town That Did Not Take

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Whatever the planners in Lisbon imagined, the Amazon did not cooperate. The new settlement's economy was built on rice and cotton worked by enslaved Indigenous people — men and women taken from the surrounding rainforest and put to labor for a community that had itself been displ...

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Mazagão Velho: Twelve Days in July

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What survived was the festival. From 16 to 28 July the village fills with masses, novenas, dawn alvoradas, processions, cavalhadas of mounted riders, and the dance called the vominê. Children are given roles and grow into bigger ones. The whole thing builds toward 25 July, the fe...

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Mazagão Velho: Fighting a Mediterranean War in the Rainforest

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The saint at the center of it is São Tiago, Saint James the Greater, who in Iberian tradition appears as Santiago Matamoros, the Moor-slayer, riding into medieval battles on the Christian side. The festival's story has him arriving among the soldiers as an unknown fighter and tur...

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