You want to go to Trancoso because it is one of the strangest and most singularly beautiful places in Brazil. You fall hard  for the town on  your first visit, and it will be  impossible to shake Trancoso off from your heads, like some disturbingly vivid dream: Were we all on drugs? Did it really look like that? Everything is centered around the Quadrado –  the beautiful town square – where locals play football and rich people from San Paulo pretend to be poor.  

The beaches are beautiful, the food is amazing, the location stunning. If there is a place in the world where you would rather do nothing than something – this is it. This is one of the hottest vacation places on earth. Not yet discovered by the mainstream. Enjoy this beautiful place. If you can’t afford the 600$ a nicht Uxua – stay in one of the poussadas where you can spend the night for around 100 $ and be pampered all around.

After the hippies came other free spirits: painters, sculptors, dancers, musicians. The actress Sonia Braga visited frequently in the 1980’s, as did the tropicália singer Gal Costa. Her former summer house on Praia dos Nativos is now a Relais & Châteaux resort, Pousada Estrela d’Água (with the best bar on the beach). Elba Ramalho, the high priestess of forró music, owned a local club called Bar Bossa, where she often took the stage.

Since the turn of the millennium, another breed of biribando has arrived, landing private jets at the Terravista airstrip and flying choppers into town. The new wave uses not fish or dentures but actual money—a lot of it—to scoop up beachfront villas and rustic pieds-à-terre. Naomi, Eddie Vedder, and Gisele have joined the Quadrado promenade. Sig Bergamin, a Brazilian interior designer with an international clientele, and Olivier Baussan, founder of L’Occitane, both own property nearby. With them came outposts of fabulous Brazilian boutiques like Lenny and Richards.
Like Goa and Ibiza before it, Trancoso would seem to be at the tipping point between high freak and high fashion, hippies and hipsters. Yet despite recent incursions, Trancoso is curiously glamour-resistant—high-end shops are usually dead-empty, and besides, nobody wears heels on the Quadrado. Here the dominant pretension is the lack thereof.