Palmares, or Quilombo dos Palmares, was a community of escaped slaves and others, in colonial Brazil that developed from 1605 until its suppression in 1694.
It was located in the captaincy of Pernambuco, in what is today the Brazilian state of Alagoas.
No contemporary document called Palmares a quilombo; instead the term mocambo
One estimate places the population of Palmares in the 1690s at around 11,000 inhabitants
By the 1640s, many of the mocambos had consolidated into larger entities ruled by kings. Dutch descriptions by Caspar Barlaeus (published 1647) and Johan Nieuhof (published 1682) spoke of two larger consolidated entities, âGreat Palmaresâ and âLittle Palmaresâ. In each of these units there was a large central town that was fortified and held 5,000-6,000 people. The surrounding hills and valleys were filled with many more mocambos of 50 to 100 people. A description of the visit of Johan Blaer to one of the larger mocambos in 1645 (which had been abandoned) revealed that there were 220 buildings in the community, a church, four smithies, and a council house. Churches were common in Palmares partly because Angolans were frequently Christianized, either from the Portuguese colony or from the Kingdom of Kongo, which was a Christianized country at that time. Others had been converted to Christianity while enslaved.