Mocambo (settlement)
Mocambos were small communities of runaway slaves in colonial Brazil, formed mainly in the 18th and 19th centuries. A mocambo was smaller than a quilombo; a quilombo could include many mocambos. The terms were not always used consistently, and sometimes people used them interchangeably.
Escape was the most common form of resistance. Fugitive communities were called mocambos, ladeiras, magotes, or quilombos, depending on who was talking.
There were three main areas where fugitive communities stayed: the plantation belt of Bahia, the mining region of Minas Gerais, and the frontier of Alagoas, where Palmares—the largest fugitive settlement—was located.
The purpose of mocambos was to protect escaped enslaved people from the Portuguese. They hid in places that were hard for the military to reach.
Life in mocambos could be harsh. Enslaved people often faced bad food and housing and cruel masters. Some mocambos survived by farming, trading arms, or raiding. They did not submit to colonial control, and because enslaved people made up a large part of Brazilian society, the number of mocambos grew.
Because mocambos challenged the slave system, authorities launched punitive military expeditions to destroy them. When a mocambo was discovered, soldiers would kill the adults and enslave any surviving children, treating them as property.
Geography helped mocambos thrive in Bahia, where rugged land made them hard to find. In Bahia and its plantation areas, enslaved people could sometimes be more than half of the population. Regions like Cairù, Camamù, and Ilhéus were important centers for mocambos and for manioc farming, a basic Brazilian crop.
Indigenous people were sometimes used as slave catchers to help control runaway communities.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 15:05 (CET).