Itamaracá comes from Tupi: itá, stone, and mbara'ká, the rattle. Stone that rattles, or stone that sings, depending on who is translating. Two-thirds of the island remains under protected Atlantic forest, the Mata Atlântica that once ran unbroken down most of the Brazilian coast and now survives in fragments. Settlement clings to a narrow strip behind twelve kilometres of white sand on the eastern shore. A reef three kilometres offshore takes the force out of the Atlantic, so the water inside it stays shallow, flat and warm, between 26 and 31 degrees most of the year. Since 1995, municipal rules have capped buildings at two storeys and barred industry outright. There are no towers on this island, which on this coast is worth noticing.

A sugar mill was established on Itamaracá in 1516, the first in Portuguese America, and the settlement around it is counted as the oldest continuously inhabited Portuguese place in the hemisphere. A chapel dedicated to Nossa Senhora da Conceição was already functioning here by 1526. In 1534 King John III made the island the seat of a hereditary captaincy; the Captaincy of Itamaracá took its name from this scrap of land while covering most of what is now the state of Paraíba. Vila Velha was its capital, and by 1630 it held more than a hundred buildings, two churches and a Santa Casa de Misericórdia. Sugar and coconut carried the island for a century and a half, worked by enslaved people whose names the mill ledgers rarely troubled to record. When gold pulled Brazil's centre of gravity south in the late seventeenth century, Itamaracá was left behind.

The island is credited with one of the first Jewish communities in the Americas, and almost nothing physical survives to prove it. Almost. In the Yosef Goldman Collection there is a copy of Sefer Shefa Tal, a kabbalistic work printed in Hanau, Germany, in 1612. On its pages someone wrote a statement of ownership: Rabbi Jacob Lagarto, of a congregation in Tamarica, Brazil. Lagarto had come to Brazil as a young man and wrote a volume of aphorisms of which no copy is known to exist. One inscription, in one book, is the entire surviving material record of a whole congregation.

Ciranda was invented here, by the wives of fishermen waiting on the beach for the boats to come back. The dance is a wide ring of people holding hands, moving to a slow repeating rhythm that can absorb newcomers indefinitely; you join by taking two hands, and that is the whole entry requirement. It became one of Pernambuco's signature forms, and Lia de Itamaracá became its most recognisable voice — honoured with a touring exhibition of her costumes and history in March 2023 and a national music award in Brasília that June. Forte Orange, built by the Dutch in 1631 and rebuilt by the Portuguese in 1654, gets most of the postcards. The ciranda is what the island actually exported.

Two things about Itamaracá rarely appear in the tourist material. The island holds a state prison complex, sited on the sheltered western side well away from the beaches — prisons were put on islands here, as elsewhere, on the assumption that most people could not swim. A long-running programme to relocate the inmates to a new facility on the mainland near Itaquitinga has been under way for years. The second is more cheerful: a federal centre for aquatic mammals operates on the island, caring for Antillean manatees, Trichechus manatus, a species that has all but vanished from this coast. Around 24,540 people live here, on fishing, tourism and small commerce. The bridge and causeway from Itapissuma is the only way in.