Palmares was never one town. The Portuguese used the name for the whole broken interior beyond the coastal sugar belt — ridge country thick with palms, which is what the word means. By 1602 planters were complaining that the people they held in bondage were vanishing into it and building mocambos, settlements the colonists could not reach. No document of the period called Palmares a quilombo; that term came later. Its own people knew the confederation as Angola Janga, which the Portuguese rendered as Little Angola, and the name fits: perhaps nine in ten of the enslaved Africans landed at Pernambuco in those decades came from Portuguese Angola. But Palmares was not only African. Indigenous people lived there, and caboclos, and poor or outcast Portuguese — including soldiers who had fled forced military service for mountains more hospitable than the barracks.

In 1630 the Dutch West India Company took Recife, and for fifteen years Pernambuco was a war zone. Thousands of enslaved people used the confusion to leave. The Dutch briefly weighed an alliance with Palmares; then peace terms left them running the same sugar economy, and Johan Maurits van Nassau sent expeditions instead. Those raids failed, but they produced the first detailed descriptions we have. Caspar Barlaeus, published in 1647, and Johan Nieuhof, published in 1682, describe two consolidated states — Great Palmares and Little Palmares — each built around a fortified central town of five to six thousand people, ringed by dozens of smaller mocambos of fifty to a hundred. When Johan Blaer reached one of the larger settlements in 1645 he found it abandoned and counted what remained: 220 buildings, a church, four smithies, a council house. It was a town, not a camp.

How many people lived there is genuinely unknown. A figure of 20,000 for the 1690s circulates widely and recent scholarship treats it as inflated; Stuart Schwartz puts it nearer 11,000, adding that either way this was "undoubtedly the largest fugitive community to have existed in Brazil." The confederation elected its chief, who distributed land, appointed officials — usually relatives — and lived in a fortified compound. Weapons came by trade: Palmares bought guns from the same colony that wanted it destroyed, and rented grazing to smallholding cattle raisers. In a fight they used the ground they knew — camouflage, ambush, traps behind fences and walls. The frequent claim that Palmares defended itself with capoeira has no documentary support; the sources describe spears, bows and firearms. Palmares kept churches too — many Angolans arrived already Christian, from the Portuguese colony or from the Christian Kingdom of Kongo — though Schwartz notes that African practice persisted alongside them. Almost everything known about Palmares was written by its enemies.

Captain Fernão Carrilho's campaigns of 1676 and 1677 did real damage — Ganga Zumba was wounded, members of his family captured — and the treaty of 1678 followed. Zumbi's own history explains why he would not sign. Born in Palmares in 1655, he was seized as a small child and given to a missionary, Father António Melo, who baptized him Francisco and taught him Portuguese and Latin. At fifteen he left and went home, having grown up on both sides of the line and understanding exactly what the crown was offering. Within a year Ganga Zumba was dead by poison — administered by Zumbi's faction, the Portuguese said, though others held that the king took it himself as a warning against trusting them. Zumbi led from 1678. Six Portuguese expeditions between 1680 and 1686 came back beaten.

What finally worked was hiring men who fought the way Palmares did. Governor Pedro de Almeida gave the bandeirantes Domingos Jorge Velho and Bernardo Vieira de Melo an army raised in the far interior — slave-hunters by trade, unencumbered by the crown's scruples. The final siege ran forty-two days. Cerca do Macaco, the capital, fell on 6 February 1694, and roughly two hundred of its people died by their own hands rather than be carried back into slavery. Zumbi escaped the ruins and stayed at large for twenty-one months. Betrayed, cornered and killed on 20 November 1695, he was beheaded, and his head was carried to Recife and set on a pike — for the stated purpose of proving to everyone who believed otherwise that he could die.

The date became the answer to the pike. Brazil marks 20 November as Dia da Consciência Negra — Black Consciousness Day — and the name attached to it is Zumbi's, not the governor's. Palmares outlasted its own destruction in pieces: the mountain state was gone, but the region sheltered smaller communities for generations. At Serra da Barriga, listed by IPHAN in 1986, the Quilombo dos Palmares Memorial Park opened in 2007 and rebuilds the settlement at full scale, with flour and herb houses, Indigenous dwellings, and narration in four languages — the only park in Brazil devoted to Black culture.