Recife, Brazil: Dutch Colonial Waterways, Olinda's Baroque Hill, and Pernambuco Culture

Olinda, 6 kilometres north of central Recife on a hillside overlooking the Atlantic, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its intact ensemble of 17th and 18th century Baroque churches, convents, and painted colonial houses — sixteen churches built in the Portuguese Baroque style across a small hilltop that has remained largely unchanged since the 18th century. The Igreja de Nossa Senhora do Carmo at the hilltop and the São Bento Monastery at its entrance are the architecturally most significant; the streets between them, lined with houses painted in solid colors of yellow, blue, and ochre, have a functional neighborhood character (artists' ateliers, small restaurants, craft shops) that gives Olinda a different texture from a preserved-but-empty historic zone. The Olinda Carnival, held in the week before Ash Wednesday, is one of the most distinctive in Brazil — giant papier-mâché puppet figures (bonecos gigantes) representing political and cultural figures are paraded through the narrow streets by enormous crowds.

The Instituto Ricardo Brennand, in a villa complex 12 kilometres west of central Recife, is one of the least-known extraordinary private museums in the Americas: a collection of over 3,000 objects relating to the Dutch colonial period in Pernambuco (the most significant collection of Frans Post paintings in the world, alongside weapons, armor, furniture, and maps from the Dutch West India Company period) housed in a purpose-built medieval castle built by the Brennand family in the early 2000s. The castle architecture is deliberately fantastical — stone towers, drawbridges, battlements — but the collection it houses is of genuine scholarly and historical significance. The grounds include a ceramics gallery with work by Francisco Brennand, whose large-scale ceramic sculpture is among the most important in Brazil. Entry is limited to advance reservation.

Frevo, the furious brass-and-percussion music of Pernambuco's carnival, originated in Recife in the late 19th century from a fusion of military marching band music and African rhythmic traditions; the characteristic parasol-and-acrobatic-step dance (passistas) that accompanies it requires years of training. The Paço do Frevo, a cultural center in the Marco Zero area of Recife Antigo (the old colonial island quarter), covers the music's history with instruments, recordings, and performance demonstrations. The Marco Zero square itself — at the original zero-kilometre marker of the colonial city — is the cultural center of Recife Antigo and where the outdoor concerts and festivals concentrate.

Local food in Recife is dominated by fresh tapioca: thin flatbreads pressed and cooked from manioc starch on flat iron griddles, filled with coalho cheese (firm, slightly salty, that chars well), coconut and cream, or regional fruits. Street tapioca vendors operate throughout Boa Viagem (the main beach neighborhood) and around the Porto Digital area. Carne de sol — sun-dried salted beef, rehydrated and grilled — appears on most regional restaurant menus served with coalho cheese, baião de dois (rice and black-eyed peas cooked together), and pirão (thick manioc broth). Boa Viagem beach, the main beach adjacent to the upscale residential neighborhood, has natural rock pools formed by the offshore reef that make it the city's primary swimming area at low tide; the reef also attracts a small population of bull sharks in the surf zone, and the local lifeguards advise against swimming beyond the reef line.