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When the first colonizers arrived in Porto Seguro in 1535, there was an enormous
village of the Tupinambás Indians in the place where today is the center of
Trancoso. The Portuguese began to consolidate their central in the region with
the arrival of the Jesuits in 1550, who started to catechize the Indians.
In Trancoso, the Jesuit priests
built the Igreja de São João Batista, a postcard of the village, in 1583. They
stayed in the small village until the beginning of the 17th century
when they were forced to leave the place because of the constant attacks of the
Aimorés, Indians who lived in the interior of the state of Bahia.
The Jesuits started to return to
the region in 1620 and called the village Vila João Batista. More then a hundred
years later, the Jesuits where expelled again, but this time by the Marques de
Pombal. Instead of the battles against the unsociable Indians, the problems at
that time were political and were known as the Guerra das Missões (War g the
Missions). In the middle of the 18th century, D. Jose I, the king of
Portugal at that time, signed the Treaty of Madrid which marked the new
Brazilian frontiers substituting the Treaty of Tordesilhas.
For the Treaty of Madrid to be
enforced various tribes of Indians had to be transferred to other regions which
caused a war between the Indians and the Jesuit priests who offered them their
total support. The Marques de Pombal then decided to expel the Jesuits from
Portugal as well as from Brazil, besides changing all the names of the villages
with names of Saints.
That is how the Vila de São João
Batista began to be called Trancoso where only the descendents of the
Portuguese, Indians and many fishermen lived until the decade g the 70’S.
However, contrary to what happened in Arraial d’Ajuda which is another district
of Porto Seguro, Trancoso still looks like a colonial village in spite of the
invasion of the hippies in the decade of the 70’S.
Many hippies went to this region
during the dictatorship to flee from the persecution but were completely
integrated into the scenery. Instead of changing the structure of the village,
the hippies maintained the same colonial architecture of the houses in a
complete atmosphere of peace and harmony with the nature.
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