Codó sits at about 47 metres above sea level in the Itapecuru Valley of eastern Maranhão, in the belt of babaçu palm forest that Brazilians call the *mata dos cocais*. The Itapecuru River drains the municipality, joined by the Codozinho, which is in turn fed by the Saco. The municipality is large — some 4,360 square kilometres, enough to make it the seventh most populous in the state — and it is stitched into the country by two lines that cross here: the BR-316 highway and the São Luís–Teresina railway, which moves fuel, cement and pig iron. Geography has quietly overruled administration. São Luís is the state capital, roughly 300 kilometres north, but Teresina is only about 170 kilometres away, and Codó looks toward Piauí far more than toward its own coast.

The colonial and imperial economy here was cotton, and cotton in the Brazilian northeast meant enslaved African labour on plantations spread through the valley. That history is not a footnote to Codó; it is the foundation of the city's population and its culture. The 2022 census recorded 68.3 percent of residents as pardo and 17.7 percent as Black. Codó was formally elevated to city status on 16 April 1896, and a wave of Syrian and Lebanese immigration began arriving from 1887, adding another layer to the commercial life of the place. The modern economy has moved on from cotton to rice, cassava, corn and beans, cattle, gypsum and limestone extraction, and a service sector that now supplies most of the municipal product.

Terecô took shape among enslaved people on the cotton plantations around Codó and in the babaçu forests beyond them, and in the early twentieth century it moved into town, taking root in the neighbourhoods near the Lagoa do Pajeleiro. It goes by several names — *tambor da mata*, the drum of the forest, and *encantaria de Bárbara Soeira* — and the word itself is thought to descend from the Bantu *intelecô*. Its deepest roots are Bantu, from Angola and the Congo, with Jeje and Nagô elements layered in; unusually among Afro-Brazilian religions, its ritual language is Portuguese. Practitioners work with *encantados*, enchanted beings associated with the forest and the land, among them Seu Légua Boji, Seu João da Mata, Pedro Angassu and Rei Cacamador. In practice terecô does not stand apart from its neighbours: it is closely interwoven with Tambor de Mina and with Umbanda, and many Codó terreiros draw on all three.

Beyond Maranhão, Codó is known nationally as the *capital da magia* — a label attached from outside, and one that has followed the city for generations. Individual terecozeiros became famous for their spiritual work, some of them with politicians among their clients, and that notoriety fed the reputation further. It is worth being precise about what sits underneath the label. These are religions, with cosmologies, liturgies, initiations and congregations, sustained by families who have kept them for well over a century. The reputation describes how the rest of Brazil talks about Codó. It does not describe the terreiros.

Carnival is the largest event of the year and pulls visitors from Teresina and São Luís, supplemented by a run of off-season carnivals with names like Cornofolia, Tsunami and Vivo Bebu. Festa Junina fills the middle of the year. And in August the celebrations associated with the Umbanda master Bita do Barão draw people from other Brazilian states and from abroad — a religious festival that has become, without ceasing to be a religious festival, the thing outsiders most often come to Codó to see. The city also hosts campuses of four public institutions: the federal and state universities of Maranhão, UFMA and UEMA, alongside the federal and state technical institutes, IFMA and IEMA.