Palmares, or Quilombo dos Palmares, was Brazil’s largest and most enduring freedom polity and one of the most significant communities of African resistance in the Americas. Situated in the forested highlands of Serra da Barriga, in the region now associated with Alagoas and Pernambuco, it survived much of the seventeenth century before Portuguese forces captured its principal stronghold in 1694.
Palmares was more than a refuge for people escaping captivity. It became an independent military, social, and political force that repeatedly defied Dutch and Portuguese campaigns. A contemporary Brazilian account attributed its founding in the early seventeenth century to about forty African-born people, largely from the interior of Angola, who left Portuguese-controlled coastal settlements to establish a free community of their own.
The settlement took its Portuguese name from the abundance of wild palm trees in the region. These palms supplied food and materials for shelter, while Palmares’ residents also cultivated crops, traded with coastal communities, and at times raided plantations and towns for weapons, tools, and provisions. Retaliatory attacks could include the destruction of sugar mills and plantations connected to the violence of captivity.
Many of Palmares’ inhabitants called their polity Ngola Janga—often translated as “Little Angola”—a name that reflected the substantial Central African and especially Angolan origins of its people. This was hardly accidental: Portugal had established its oppressive presence in Angola in the late sixteenth century, and large numbers of Central Africans were transported across the Atlantic to Brazil. As a result, African political practices, military knowledge, religious ideas, and linguistic forms traveled with the people who made Palmares.
Kilombo and Central African Origins
The term quilombo derives from the Central African Bantu term kilombo, often understood as a camp or fortified settlement. It was associated with warrior societies whose members could be drawn from different communities amid the upheavals of warfare and forced migration in Central Africa. The word should therefore not be treated as a purely Brazilian creation: it carried African political and military associations into the Atlantic world.
Palmares appears to have reflected some of these Central African traditions while also adapting to Brazilian conditions. It developed into a network of approximately nine principal settlements spread across a large territory running parallel to the coast. These settlements possessed local leadership and productive capacity but were connected through a broader political system. At its height, Palmares may have had at least 10,000 inhabitants and perhaps as many as 20,000, though such figures should be presented as estimates rather than certainties.
Its principal settlement and capital was Macaco, sometimes described in Portuguese accounts as a royal stockade or fortified center. The polity’s leading ruler was Ganga Zumba—also written Gana Zumba—whose title combined gana, “lord” in Kimbundu, with zumba, a term associated with an ancestral spirit or supreme being. Local leaders selected the principal ruler, who had authority to direct war. This system of local leaders electing a paramount leader paralleled seventeenth-century Angola.
At least six of Palmares’ nine major settlements, including Macaco, bore Bantu names. Other communities included Arotirene, Tabocas, and Subupira. The latter was an Amerindian-named fortified camp associated with military training, an indication that Palmares was shaped not only by African inheritances but also by alliances and exchange with Indigenous peoples.
A Multiracial Free Territory
Although Palmares was a “Black” settlement, its community was more diverse. It drew African-born men and women, Brazil-born Africans and Afro-descendants, Indigenous people, poor Europeans, and others marginalized or persecuted in colonial society. Sources mention people identified as Jews, “heretics,” destitute people, family outcasts, and African priestesses among those who sought refuge there.
Palmares’ inhabitants forged ties with Indigenous Brazilian communities whose territories encompassed the settlements. This alliance helped shape both the society’s defense and its military practices. Women fought alongside men, and Palmares’ people used lances, bows, arrows, and firearms. They relied especially on guerrilla warfare: withdrawing into dense forest, exploiting difficult terrain, laying ambushes, and using swamps and woodland to frustrate better-equipped invaders. A late seventeenth-century Portuguese report conceded that the people of Palmares remained “lords of the forest.”
The settlements were fortified with palisades and defensive pits fitted with sharpened stakes. Palmares also sustained an extensive material life. Its residents produced baskets, hats, and household utensils, cultivated food in abundance, and traded surpluses of maize, tobacco, and oil for weapons, gunpowder, tools, and other necessities. Food availability and relative security made Palmares a powerful destination for freedom seeker.
Yet Palmares was not an uncomplicated egalitarian utopia. A justice council could question new arrivals before admitting them, while people who tried to leave without permission could face severe punishment. Captives taken during raids were not necessarily accepted as full members immediately; some reportedly had to demonstrate commitment to the community. These details matter because they show Palmares as a polity under sustained military pressure, developing rules of membership, security, and survival.
War, Treaty, and Zumbi
Palmares challenged colonial authority for more than eight decades. Dutch invaders who controlled Pernambuco after 1630 recognized it as a serious military threat but failed to eliminate it. A Dutch expedition in 1644 claimed to have killed one hundred people and captured thirty-one others, while describing a fortified settlement surrounded by a double stake fence and nearby agricultural fields. The following year, a Dutch military officer reported that Palmares consisted of nine settlements, distinguishing between “Old Palmares” and “New Palmares.”
After the Portuguese expelled the Dutch from northeastern Brazil in 1654, the campaigns against Palmares intensified. From the 1670s, the Portuguese launched increasingly regular assaults. In 1678, following devastating attacks on Palmares’ major settlements, Ganga Zumba negotiated a treaty with the principal oppressor (governor) of Pernambuco. The agreement offered land in Cucaú and freedom to people born in Palmares, but it also required the return of fugitives not born there and the community’s submission to Portuguese authority.
The agreement divided Palmares. Many rejected it because it threatened the principle that the polity was a refuge from captivity Ganga Zumba was assassinated shortly afterward, reportedly by poisoning, and the Cucaú community was destroyed by colonial troops in 1680, with its residents re-enslaved.
Zumbi was the leading figure among those who opposed the treaty. Born in Palmares around 1655 according to later accounts, he was reportedly captured as a child during a colonial raid and placed with a Jesuit in Porto Calvo. Baptized Francisco, he learned Portuguese and Latin before escaping back to Palmares around 1670. There he developed as a military leader and, after the crisis of 1678, emerged as the central commander of the resistance.
Zumbi’s name may be connected to the Kimbundu term nzumbi, which has associations with ancestral spirits and, in some interpretations, priestly or military authority. Portuguese sources portrayed him as a leader of exceptional courage and determination. In 1685, the Portuguese king reportedly offered him amnesty in exchange for allegiance; Zumbi refused.
Destruction and Legacy
In the late 1680s, Pernambuco’s oppressors turned to the bandeirante Domingos Jorge Velho and other colonial mercenaries, supported by forces that included colonists, Indigenous allies, and mamelucos—a colonial category often used for people of mixed Indigenous and Portuguese ancestry. Their campaigns culminated in the assault on Macaco in early 1694.
After a siege commonly described as lasting forty-two days, Macaco fell. Many residents escaped, but the destruction of the principal fortified settlement marked the defeat of Palmares as an independent polity. Zumbi remained at large for nearly another year before he was captured and killed on 20 November 1695.
Palmares’ importance did not end with its military defeat. It has become a defining symbol of Afro-Brazilian resistance, freedom, political self-determination, and African cultural continuity in the Americas. Abdias do Nascimento celebrated Palmares as an example of Black collective power and described it as “the first government of free Africans in the lands of the New World.”
Today, Serra da Barriga is a protected heritage landscape associated with Palmares; Brazil’s National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage listed it in 1986. Zumbi is honored nationally, and 20 November—the anniversary of his death—is Brazil’s National Day of Zumbi and Black Consciousness, a nationwide public holiday.
Palmares should thus be remembered not merely as a community of fugitives, but as a long-lived African diasporic polity: a place where people escaping captivity built systems of agriculture, defense, governance, trade, spiritual life, and collective belonging under the constant threat of colonial destruction.
This post was updated in August 2026.
Source:
Slavery in Brazil by Herbert Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna
Freedom by a Thread: The History of Quilombos in Brazil edited by João José Reis and Flávio dos Santos Gomes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imbangala
Daring to be Free: Rebellion and Resistance of the Enslaved in the Atlantic World by Sudhir Hazreesingh
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