Mazagao

Mazagão lies in the wooded river country north of the Amazon estuary. Its colonial history began far across the Atlantic, in a Portuguese fortified town on the coast of Morocco. When Portugal abandoned that stronghold, its inhabitants were sent to establish a new settlement in the Amazon, amid lands already inhabited by Indigenous communities.

The displaced families travelled first to Lisbon and then to Belém, where they waited for their new settlement to be prepared, before arriving at the new town between 1770 and 1776. The Crown provided enslaved Africans to the settlers, tying the settlement to the forced labour and violence of the Atlantic slave trade. The new Mazagão carried a name and memories from North Africa into an unfamiliar landscape of tropical rivers and forests.

The later city of Macapá lies here.