Qualla: Laguna, Santa Catarina

Laguna, Santa Catarina: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DrRandomFactor, CC BY-SA 3.0. On a beach here, a wild dolphin will roll on its side and a fisherman will read it as a signal. He casts his net into the shallows, the dolphin herds the fish into the trap, and both walk away fed. No one trained the animals to do this. The arrangement has held since at least 1847, passed down dolphin to dolphin and fisherman to fisherman, on a stretch of coast that has been quietly remarkable for far longer than that. Laguna, on the southern shore of Santa Catarina, is a town of old churches and saltwater history where a heroine was born, a republic flickered into being, and people and dolphins still keep their bargain.

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Image: DrRandomFactor | CC BY-SA 3.0

Laguna, Santa Catarina: Three Centuries by the Sea

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Otávio Nogueira from Fortaleza, BR, CC BY 2.0. Laguna was founded in 1676 by settlers out of the Captaincy of São Vicente, making it one of the older European footholds on this coast. It earned recognition as a municipality in 1714 and the formal status of city in 1847, accumulating the layered architecture of a long-lived po...

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Image: Otávio Nogueira from Fortaleza, BR | CC BY 2.0

Laguna, Santa Catarina: The Capital That Lasted Months

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit BrunoEspindola84, CC BY-SA 4.0. For a brief, charged moment in 1839, this small port was the capital of a country. During the Ragamuffin War, the long rebellion that gripped southern Brazil, revolutionaries pushed north from Rio Grande do Sul and proclaimed the Juliana Republic, declaring Laguna its seat. The n...

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Image: BrunoEspindola84 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Laguna, Santa Catarina: The Woman Called the Heroine of Two Worlds

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stuckkey, CC BY-SA 3.0. It was here, amid that revolution, that Laguna gave history one of its most striking figures. Ana Maria de Jesus Ribeiro was born on August 30, 1821, in the Morrinhos district of Laguna, into a family of Azorean descent. The world came to know her as Anita Garibaldi. She met the ...

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Image: Stuckkey | CC BY-SA 3.0

Laguna, Santa Catarina: Partners in the Surf

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Otávio Nogueira from Fortaleza, BR, CC BY 2.0. For all its history, Laguna's strangest treasure is still playing out at the waterline. The resident pod of bottlenose dolphins works the shallow water off the town in a partnership found in only a handful of places on the planet. The fishermen wade in and wait; the dolphins driv...

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Image: Otávio Nogueira from Fortaleza, BR | CC BY 2.0