Arraial Do Cabo: walking tour

High on this bluff above Praia dos Anjos sits one of the earliest Christian chapels in South America, though you might notice something odd about how it sits on the land. Its whitewashed front door points straight out over the water, turning its back completely on the town behind it.

That awkward posture makes total sense once you realize which came first. In 1503, an Italian navigator sailing under the Portuguese flag, Amerigo Vespucci, anchored in the sheltered cove below. When his fleet sailed on, he left twenty-four men behind to cut timber. Sometime between 1503 and 1506, those stranded sailors built a rough shelter of clay and straw to hold a wooden figure of Our Lady of Remedies. Local tradition claims the very first indoor Catholic mass in Brazil was celebrated right inside that thatch-roofed hut.

The simple building here today, with its royal blue window frames and modest belfry, was built later out of stone and lime to replace that perishable shelter. But it kept the original orientation. In the early sixteenth century, the ocean was the only highway that mattered. Everything arrived by ship, from news of Lisbon to supplies and hostile corsairs. The ocean was where you looked for salvation or disaster.

Centuries later, when fishing cottages began spreading across the sand dunes behind the hill, the town grew landward. Nobody bothered to turn the altar around. So the church remained just as it was, facing the open anchorage where European colonization first dug in its heels.