Qualla: Serra da Barriga

Serra da Barriga: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thalita Chargel, CC BY-SA 4.0. Drive out of União dos Palmares and the hill hardly announces itself. It is a long green ridge with cane and pasture on its flanks, cattle tracks switching up the slope, nothing about it that says fortress. Then you climb it. The ground drops away, the plain opens out for kilometres in every direction, and you understand what the people who built a town up here understood: anyone coming for them would be seen long before arriving, and would have to come uphill the whole way. For most of the seventeenth century this ridge in what is now Alagoas carried Macaco, the principal settlement of Palmares - the largest community of self-liberated Africans in the Americas.

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Image: Thalita Chargel | CC BY-SA 4.0

Serra da Barriga: The Shape of the Ground

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Amikep, CC BY-SA 4.0. Serra da Barriga belongs to the southern Borborema Plateau, a band of uplands that catches the wet air coming off the Atlantic and holds it. The serra runs roughly 8.6 kilometres end to end and reaches about 3.35 kilometres at its widest, covering something near 28 square kilomet...

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Image: Amikep | CC BY-SA 4.0

Serra da Barriga: Macaco on the Summit

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thalita Chargel, CC BY-SA 4.0. The settlement on the ridge was called Cerca do Macaco, also recorded as Cerca Real dos Macacos - the walled place, the royal enclosure. It was the seat of what the Portuguese rendered as Angola Janga, Little Angola, and after 1654 it is thought to have held as many as ten thousa...

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Image: Thalita Chargel | CC BY-SA 4.0

Serra da Barriga: The Siege on the Ridge

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Juniorjrowudoqk, CC BY-SA 4.0. Terrain that protects you can also trap you. In January 1694 the bandeirante Domingos Jorge Velho brought a force reported at some six thousand men against the serra, well provisioned and - crucially, for a hill defence - carrying artillery. The advantage the slope had given Maca...

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Image: Juniorjrowudoqk | CC BY-SA 4.0

Serra da Barriga: What the Ground Keeps

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vanderlei Almeida de Oliveira, CC BY-SA 4.0. For most of the following three centuries the serra was farmland, and the town it had held existed mainly as a name. That changed in the twentieth century, slowly, then officially: IPHAN, Brazil's national heritage institute, listed Serra da Barriga in 1986, and the site has sinc...

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Image: Vanderlei Almeida de Oliveira | CC BY-SA 4.0

Serra da Barriga: Climbing the Hill in November

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Amikep, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Parque Memorial Quilombo dos Palmares opened on the summit in 2007. It is not a reconstruction in the archaeological sense - it is a memorial, with dwellings and ocas built in period style, structures for processing cassava, viewpoints over the plain, and audio narration offe...

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Image: Amikep | CC BY-SA 4.0