Jequitinhonha Delta

The Jequitinhonha reaches the Atlantic at Belmonte on the coast of Bahia. Known in colonial accounts as the Rio Grande de Belmonte, its mouth linked coastal shipping with the river valley. Indigenous settlements occupied this shore before Portuguese colonists arrived. Channels and river bars mattered to local exchange, since boats depended on openings between the river, neighbouring waterways and the sea.

In the early eighteenth century, settlers from Portugal and other parts of the colony formed São Pedro do Rio Grande under the guidance of the Jesuit José de Araújo Ferraz. A chapel was built around 1708–1712, and a royal charter created the parish in 1718. The settlement became a vila in 1764. Accounts of the nearby Barreta das Farinhas describe flour from surrounding fields being loaded there; floods could break an opening through the sand ridge, which the sea soon closed again. The delta was thus a changing working waterfront, where cultivation, Indigenous communities and colonial settlement met. Its importance rested on access through unstable channels as much as on formal town status.