Palmares or Quilombo dos Palmares, former autonomous community of villages comprised of fugitive African slaves and indigenous peoples, present-day Pernambuco and Alagoas states, NE Brazil. Its capital was the fortified village of Macaco. Most of the inhabitants had been slaves on sugar plantations along the Atlantic coast, and from c.1630 to 1694 some 10,000–20,000 lived in the villages, which were known as quilombos or mocambos. The villages as a group were organized according to Central African customs, and owed allegiance to an elected chief. The Portuguese and the Dutch, who controlled the area in the mid-1600s, mounted colonial expeditions against Palmares several times before the Portuguese finally conquered it in 1694.
See M. D'Salete, Angola Janga (2019).
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