In the Northeast, local authorities ignore the erosion of food culture and coastal ecosystems, as access to beaches, mangroves and foraging areas is increasingly restricted
“Here, there’s guaru over here!”. Artist and indigenous studies scholar Diana Rodriguez points at a small shrub growing in the sand at Rio da Barra beach in Trancoso, a district of the municipality of Porto Seguro, in the state of Bahia. From its round, thick leaves, emerges a magenta-colored fruit, about the size of a jabuticaba, a Brazilian fruit.
Diana bends down, picks up the fruit and hands it to me. It’s fleshy, and tastes like an apple. “It’s rare to find it nowadays. Whenever I go to the beach I try to look for it. We used to make guaru paste, there was a lot back then”, she explains.
But she is soon interrupted by the arrival of a security guard from one of the summer vacation-home condominiums, who a few meters away from the bush, was overseeing the construction of a large wooden deck for tourists to store lounge chairs and cushions.
With a walkie talkie on his belt, he checks our presence in that public space.
“Hey, how are you doing? Good afternoon. I’m just showing them some berries over here. But we’ll be leaving in a short while, ok?”, Diana says preemptively.
The security guard asks what we’re doing there. She answers that it’s research on the foods of the sandbank/restinga.
The sandbank is a coastal ecosystem located in the transition zone between the Atlantic Forest and the beach. It has diverse vegetation and plays an important environmental role, protecting other ecosystems, such as mangroves.
In November 2025, Joio visited various districts of Porto Seguro to understand how the deforestation of the sandbank has contributed to the disappearance of plants from the region’s food culture.
The survey is part of the Map of Food Losses, a Joio project that investigates the reasons behind the decline in food diversity in Brazil.
During the project’s mapping process, Diana sent out a list of 24 foods, including fruits and seafood, which were part of her childhood in Trancoso but are now hard for her to find. The cause: the impact of the real estate boom driven by high end tourism and vacation homes on the district.
The artist was born 29 years ago on that very same plot of land, now partially covered by the condominium’s deck. She spent her childhood there eating whatever grew on the restinga.
“This was literally my backyard. Every day we ate fruits from the restinga, fished in the mangrove, gathered crabs, moray eels, guaiamum crabs”, she recalls.
Diana is the daughter of an Italian mother and an Argentine father who moved to Trancoso in the 1980s, following a wave of avant-garde tourism driven by the hippie movement.
From a local resident, her mother bought the small plot of land with a simple wooden “wattle-and-daub” house on an island surrounded by the mangrove at the mouth of the Barra River, in the far north of the district.
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She raised her children there within the local culture, but as was the case with many locals, she eventually came under pressure from the advance of real estate speculation in the region. After years of resistance, she sold the last piece of land in 2012.
The family still lives in Trancoso, but far from the beach. As in other parts of Porto Seguro, it is rare to find locals who still live near the sea in the district.
Some time after coming onto the counterculture radar, Porto Seguro became a very mainstream location. The municipality currently has the third largest hotel facility structure in the country, with around 70 thousand beds. There were 2.5 million visitors in 2024, according to data from the Municipal Department for Tourism.
Such figures, celebrated by the local government, have significant impact on native vegetation, especially the restinga area.
Unregulated construction on this ecosystem is one of the main causes of its destruction. Along the sandy shoreline throughout Porto Seguro, there are many walls belonging to hotels and condominiums, massive beach huts serving tourists, as well as the aforementioned decks.
“We’re seeing a lot of construction happening right on the beach, where there used to be various food and medicinal species. The whole sandbank area beneath this deck is dead. It makes you want to cry, “, laments Diana.
An ecosystem under threat
On November 6, students from the Federal University of Southern Bahia (UFSB), in Porto Seguro, gathered for a debate at the 8th Brazilian Restinga Symposium. On the occasion, oceanographer Igor Pinheiro, a professor at the university, presented data showing a significant loss of plant biomass in the restinga across all districts of the municipality.
Between 2017 and 2020, on the northern coastline of Porto Seguro alone, the sandbank was reduced from six to four square kilometers. Infrastructure construction is the main cause of deforestation.
“The restinga acts as a kind of sediment reservoir for the beach. During extreme weather events, when the tide rises higher and winds intensify, the sea tries to wash away sediment from the beach and the resting/sandbank holds it back and replenishes it. Without it, there is a tendency toward accelerated erosive processes”, explains Igor.
In another presentation, geologist Caio Rangel, also a professor at UFSB, described the difficulties he faced while completing a walking expedition along the Porto Seguro coast. “I was scared. At high tide, on many stretches, there’s no beach left. We are left without a strip of sand”, he states.
These sandy stretches are federally owned lands, known as Terrenos de Marinha — a 33 meter zone between the average high tide line and the shore. In order to build on them, developers must request authorization from the Office for Federal Assets (Secretaria de Patrimônio da União – SPU), which ultimately delegates the decision to the municipality.
If these strips were not privatized, it would be possible to preserve an important sandbank area, according to lawyer and socio-environmental activist Vinicius Parracho, a former city councilor in Porto Seguro.
“It would allow people to enjoy it as a public area. But the municipal government always say they have absolutely no interest [in keeping the land public], and they allow the owners to build right up to the water’s edge”, he explains.
To Caio, the geologist, public authorities have ignored the environmental impacts caused by the “overwhelming real estate speculation” in southern Bahia.
“Those who should be monitoring, managing, prohibiting and enforcing penalties are not doing their job for various reasons – conflicts of interest, malfeasance. The fact is that the territory is being destroyed”, he denounces.
In Brazil, the National Coastal Management Plan recognizes coastal ecosystems as national heritage and provides for zoning instruments that should guide land-use planning in these regions.
The Forest Code (Law nº 12.651/2012), on the other hand, defines restinga/sandbank ecosystems as Permanent Preservation Areas (APP), prohibiting vegetation removal except in limited legal circumstances.
“What happens is that the regulations are not enforced”, states oceanographer Igor.
In the case of restingas, failure to comply with legal preservation frameworks is facilitated by the population’s lack of awareness regarding the very existence of this ecosystem.
On that day, after the interruption, Diana continued showing other foods from her childhood, preserved in a rare stretch of restinga that remains intact.
“This is a caxandó tree, or coquinho xandó (little xandó coconut). People used to put it in cachaça because it’s really sweet. This is a maracujázinho da praia plant (“small beach passionfruit”), this one’s harder to find. This is a beach apricot. That one over there is the beach cactus fruit”, she continued.
The recolonization of Porto Seguro
Porto Seguro is considered the starting point of the colonization of the Brazilian territory. The mount sighted by the Portuguese fleet, named Pascoal, is located in this municipality in the state of Bahia.
A carved stone column bearing the symbols of the Cross of the Order of Christ and the Portuguese coat of arms marks this “original sin” in the town’s historic center. The indigenous people, however, point out that colonization never ceased.
Tour guide André de Souza Morais has memorized several passages from the letter describing the sighting of the mount, written by the scribe, Pero Vaz de Caminha – the first official Portuguese document to describe Brazilian lands.
He recalls that the diet of the first indigenous people to come into contact with the Portuguese – the Tupiniquim, who inhabited the southern coast of Bahia in 1500 – was also described in the letter.
In it, the scribe raises a question. “How are they [the indigenous peoples] able to sustain these bodies? Since we have seen no provisions here, no animals for slaughter. Just by eating these fruits and roots here, this ‘yam’ thing”, the guide paraphrases.
From the beginning of colonization to the mid-20th century, however, Porto Seguro was “forgotten” by the various waves of development, as a captaincy (strips of land in Brazil granted by the Portuguese Crown to members of the nobility for colonization and exploitation) separate from the rest of Bahia. As a result, it also stayed outside the first real estate booms.
However, as André explains, from the 1970s onward, two milestones catapulted Porto Seguro onto the world stage. The first was logistical. The municipality gained an international airport and a paved highway. The second is musical: the videoclip tied to the explosion of the lambada rhythm at local parties. The music video of “Chorando se Foi” by the band Kaoma was filmed in Trancoso, portraying the location as a libertarian paradise.
In the next decade, the buzz reached another audience: high school seniors. Companies started to organize trips to Porto Seguro to celebrate high school graduation.
But it was in the year 2000, marking the 500th anniversary of the sighting of Mount Pascoal, that things got out of hand. The colonization celebrations propelled the so-called “Discovery Coast” into the spotlight of national tourism.
The Bahia state government and Prodetur, a program of the Ministry of Tourism, invested heavily in the municipality’s infrastructure, turning it into one of the main destinations for Brazilian mass tourism.
A quarter of a century later, the municipality continues to break visitor records and remains the undisputed high school graduation celebration capital.
The restinga, however, left in tears (“chorando se foi”), as per the lambada song lyrics.
One effect of this mass tourism has been the massive beach barracas (large beachside roofed establishments, like tents) which occupy practically all of the municipality’s northern coastline. They function as true commercial centers, complete with stages and restaurants. During peak seasons, they are visited by thousands of tourists.
Botanist Mário Teixeira studies the environmental impact of beach barracas. “They gradually clear the vegetation, then request authorization from City Hall, who grants it. This lack of governance has significantly increased the number of these barracas, mainly in the sandbank protection areas”, he explains.
It’s not just the beach huts/barracas that threaten the local vegetation. After the counterculture movement and the wave of euphoric teenagers, Porto Seguro has seen a new wave of tourism over the past decade.
“In Porto Seguro, real estate developments aim for a high Total Sales Value (Valor Geral de Vendas – VGV). This makes them aggressive towards the environment, society and even the region’s very identity”, explains architect Moah Torres, a member of the Architecture and Urban Planning Council of Bahia.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, these developments have been changing. They have become increasingly tied to the financial market, as explained by Vinicius Parracho.
“Today, in the real estate market, properties are sold on Faria Lima Avenue [ Brazil’s financial center, in São Paulo] with a guaranteed fixed return on the investment. Buyers don’t even need to know where Porto Seguro is”, he explains.
In the wake of this financialization, the boom in beachfront condos and plots of land follows the guidebook for house and land sales to investment funds that operate on platforms such as Airbnb.
Given the situation, one would expect greater attention from public authorities. Oversight and enforcement, however, does not seem to be among the priorities for local governments.
“Most of the mayors who have served here since the 1980s are owners of real estate developments. City Hall ends up acting as an agent for this market”, summarizes Vinicius.
Fenced-off mangroves, walled-off mangaba groves
Running rampant, the real estate frenzy impacts not only the restinga, but also other ecosystems that are important to the food security and culture of those native to Porto Seguro.
Capoeira practitioner and socio-environmental activist Gabriel Ribeiro Pataxó was born and raised in Arraial d’Ajuda. He explains that the local afro-descendant population made their living primarily from fishing. Southern Bahia is marked by the miscegenation between black and indigenous peoples, which is also reflected in the exchange of knowledge and food traditions.
“My uncles and grandparents were fishermen. Much of the fishing practice was learned from indigenous people”, he explains. Just as important as fishing, was shellfish gathering. “I used to go to the mangroves a lot, looking for sururu, crabs and guaiamum to gather. The mangrove swamp is a tool for survival”, he states.
However, Gabriel believes that the ecosystem – a nursery for marine life – is also one of the most affected by unregulated urban expansion. “Tourism dumps waste directly into the rivers, which are connected to the mangroves “, he explains.
This waste also flows into the reefs, another important source of traditional local food.
“We used to go to the reef with a boatman and some iron tools to catch sea urchins. You can actually eat them raw. You open them on the beach, add a little lemon, some flour and down the hatch”, he explains. This activity is less frequent today.
It is not only the scarcity of seafood that undermines traditional food sources in Porto Seguro, but the difficulty to access its ecosystems.
In 2022, the Trancoso Fishermen’s Association, Garimpeiros do Mar (“Sea Prospectors), secured an injunction blocking the construction of a luxury condo on a mangrove area.
The case is still pending in court and is just one example of attempts to privatize lands traditionally used as common land by local extractive communities. Restricted access to the beaches due to the closure of public rights of way is another growing problem.
“Traditional communities have been losing their spaces. We have been resisting for a long time, because the millionaires have been taking away our freedom of movement”, denounces Robson Alves, president of the association.
The fencing off of common-use territories is also described by chef Débora Pataxó, who grew up in Alcobaça, a municipality south of Porto Seguro. Despite not yet having been swallowed up by high end real estate speculation, the town has long dealt with the presence of summer vacation homes, which subdivide lands where the Pataxó once gathered fruits.
Débora recalls the buckets of cashew fruit she used to harvest with her aunt in areas that are now deforested. “There was real abundance. We would spend our afternoons roasting cashew nuts on paint cans over hot coals, and making jam in a wood-burning stove. It used to take days until it was ready. It’s an experience that will die with us.”
The chef recalls memories of the summer vacation homes that remained closed up for most of the year, “rotting away”. Her mother worked in some of them.
When they didn’t clear the local vegetation, the houses often ended up fencing off fruit trees.
“The land is very fertile, with mango and coconut trees just full of fruit. When I was a kid, we would climb over the fences of the summer vacation homes to get coconut water, because in our minds it made sense to have access to that”, she says. “Still does.”
Some of these fenced-off foods cannot even be accessed in other ways, as they rarely appear on supermarket shelves, which tend to favor mass-produced fruits. As a result, foods that were once abundant are becoming increasingly scarce in the local diet.
This is the case with the mangaba, a traditional fruit from Southern Bahia, which is picked up off the ground after falling from the tree. The same applies to the previously mentioned caxandó.
A plate of acarajé for R$ 80 – the inflation of high end tourism
High end tourism brings in another impact on the local food scene: a form of gentrification that drives up the prices of fish and seafood.
On this New Year’s Eve, the district went viral because of restaurant prices. Tiktokers who spent thousands of Reais to ring in the new year at parties in the district were surprised to find skewers costing R$ 95 and hamburgers selling for R$ 110.
It would be laughable if it didn’t affect everyone. The biggest shock we experienced was an acarajé priced at a modest R$ 80. Moquecas could easily reach R$ 400.
“They’ve turned our food into gourmet fare and sometimes even we don’t have access to what is ours”, says Janice Cardoso, a native Pataxó woman from the district of Caraíva, part of Porto Seguro.
The rising cost of living is widespread. Gabriel Ribeiro Pataxó, who grew up in the historic center of Arraial d’Ajuda, now lives in a peripheral district and describes a scenario of impoverishment.
“Most of the population now lives in deplorable conditions in relation to the cost of living”, he describes. Rent, gas, groceries — prices keep pace with the spending power of tourists and the wealthy newcomers.
But perhaps the most inflated prices are precisely for seafood. “Fish has become a luxury item. The price for a kilo is absurdly high, tourist prices, Gabriel says.
The activist believes that this gentrification has led to food insecurity among local residents. “Just because you’re buying a carton of milk or a packet of cream crackers doesn’t mean that you’re satisfying your hunger. We need to eat fruits, seafood, healthy protein”, he adds.
The erasure of Afro-indigenous cuisine
If you look in Iza Souza’s refrigerator, you’ll hardly find any fish or seafood. “I can’t afford them”, she admits. At least, not for her own consumption. Iza is a cook and currently does seasonal work in the homes of wealthy tourists who rent houses in Trancoso’s luxury condos.
She has worked as a maid in summer homes belonging to major businesspeople and high-ranking politicians, as well as having cooked for Brazilian TV A-Listers. “A truckload of supplies would arrive, there were lots of refrigerators. There were days when I would count 70 guests, the elite of the elite, and there I was cooking on my own”, she recalls.
Iza tells us she “woke up as a cook” one day at the beginning of the 2000s, when she decided to move, with her three children, from a small town called Itagimirim, in the countryside of Bahia— about 100km from Porto Seguro — to Trancoso. Before that, she worked as a rural schoolteacher. When she arrived in the district, still at a young age, the only work she could find was in the mansions that were starting to be built.
In a short time she was promoted to the kitchen and says she became something of a “tourist attraction” during tours of the home of an airline company owner. “His wife made a point of taking her guests to see me and say ‘you see my cook? She used to be a teacher, poor girl, and now she has to wash my underwear’.”
In the meantime, Iza concluded a course in classical cuisine. She went on to work for restaurants and catering services. Despite her experience, she is not considered a chef within the gastronomic niche. “I’m a private house cook, I take orders. My knowledge, in these settings, is completely erased.”
This “erasure” set off alarm bells for Iza, when during a one-off job for banking partners during the pandemic, she was asked to prepare dishes from the local cuisine. “I didn’t even cook Brazilian food. I just followed recipes from French and Italian cuisine”, she says.
That’s when she decided to reconnect with her culinary roots. She began visiting her father, of Afro-indigenous heritage, to ask him about their traditions. At the same time, she started seeking out traditional cuisine in the markets of Porto Seguro.
Iza immersed herself in research and founded Manjar Ancestral, a project dedicated to the cultural revival of Afro-Indigenous cuisine from southern Bahia. She traveled to various communities to interview female cooks.
“The cuisine here is more based on fruit, root vegetables, seafood and fish. The local moqueca includes coconut milk, plantains and biribiri, which is like a starfruit and adds acidity. And there wasn’t that much fresh fish; instead, people used salted and sun-dried fish”, she shares.
Shellfish mingau and mullet in dendê oil
In the Quadrado, historic center and heart of Trancoso gentrification, a local woman defies the statistics of restaurants run by international chefs. Janete Vieira, who owns the restaurant Ali na Janete, is the only local who instead of selling or leasing one of the traditional wattle-and-daub houses to out-of-town businesspeople, bought one for herself.
Her father, native resident João de Antídio, was a wise man. He predicted that the little town center “would be a huge hit”, in Janete’s words. He left a piece of advice to his 14 children, Janete being the youngest: “Don’t sell, don’t give up your little house.”
Janete’s mother, Bernarda, was a shellfish gatherer. “Twice a day she would go to the rocks and the mangroves to fish.” It was from her that Janete learned to cook. “Mom cooked very well. I loved it when she made shellfish mingau, with flour and grated coconut milk.”
Janete started selling food from a small beach stall, where she prepared cassava, fried fish and moqueca. Now 61, she has witnessed the entire transformation of Trancoso, from a quiet village into a retreat for millionaires.
In 2000, she opened a restaurant. Nine years later, she moved to the dazzling pink house where her business is now located. After another 14 years paying rent, she was able to purchase the space in 2021.
Janete prepares dishes that are more in line with local cuisine. However, she has to source shellfish from outside the area. “There’s none left in Trancoso anymore. Everything’s polluted”. The menu features bobó, seafood stew, fish with shrimp, crab and octopus. “And a pasta dish or two, because we have to keep the customers satisfied”, she admits.
On her days off, when she gets together with her sisters, they prefer to prepare the recipes from back in the day. “Guaiamum, pirão, moqueca – our way.”
A few kilometers to the south, in the district of Caraíva, another group of women shares the mission of reviving ancestral recipes. They are the members of Imamakã Xohã, a collective of Pataxó “warrior women” from the Barra Velha Indigenous Territory.
Twry Pataxó, one of the founders, created the group in 2015 when she realized that processed foods in the villages were becoming popular very very quickly, and her relatives were falling ill. “Depression, obesity, heart problems. I did some research and found that these issues were related to poor nutrition”, she says.
Imamakã Xohã brings together 45 women who prepare traditional meals and medicinal cosmetics for locals and tourists. “It’s a space for care. We encourage healthier eating through plants, because when we were small kids, we didn’t eat any canned food. We ate wild plants”, she explains, while she prepares lunch for the reporting team.
The diversity is impressive. On the counter, we have caruru salad, ora-pro-nobis, “poor man’s caruru”, basil, plantain herb, Maranhão coriander, black beggarticks, stonebreaker and jambu. Simmering over a low fire are pirão and mullet in palm oil pulp. For dessert: mangaba mousse. The next day’s menu featured stingray with plantains and cassava broth.
To Caminy Pataxó, a group member and a descendant of an important tribe chief, cooking is part of the indigenous struggle. “It prepares our body, spirit and health. We cannot forget our sacred food.”