Maceió sits on a narrow shelf between the Mundaú lagoon and the Atlantic, and that pinch of geography explains most of the city. Elevations run from about seven metres near the water up to three hundred on the tablelands behind, so the city climbs from beach to bluff in a few kilometres. The 2022 census counted 957,916 residents in roughly 509 square kilometres, with about 1.35 million in the wider metropolitan area - the largest city in Alagoas and its capital. The climate is tropical monsoon and remarkably even-tempered: an annual average near 25 °C, January highs around 31 °C, July down to about 27 °C but considerably wetter. Nobody here talks about summer and winter. They talk about the rains.

The city grew out of a sugar mill and its plantation lands, and it grew because ships kept coming into Jaraguá bay for timber. That natural harbour - deep enough, sheltered enough, and sitting conveniently beside the Mundaú lagoon - turned a mill settlement into a port. Once the mills were running at scale, sugar went out through Jaraguá, and after it tobacco, coconut, leather and spices. The settlement was raised to a vila on 5 December 1815, and on 9 December 1839 it took the capital of Alagoas away from older rivals. Nineteenth-century shipping reports, tracking the cotton bales that came down to the quays, spelled it Macaio. The Port of Jaraguá still works, and its old warehouse district - all stucco and shutters above the water - is the one part of the city where the sugar century is still legible.

The colour is the first thing visitors mention and the hardest to believe from photographs. A reef line runs parallel to the shore off Pajuçara, and at low tide it traps a band of shallow water that turns an implausible pale green. Jangadas - the flat-bottomed sailing rafts of the Northeast, now mostly motor-assisted - carry people out to stand waist-deep in it, and the fleet moored off Pajuçara at dawn, sails furled, is as much a fixture of Maceió as the beachfront itself. North of Pajuçara the sand runs on through Ponta Verde and Jatiúca and out past Cruz das Almas toward Riacho Doce and Ipioca, getting quieter with every kilometre. At Pontal da Barra, on the lagoon side, the craft is filé - an openwork lace embroidered on netting, worked in doorways and sold from the same houses.

Turn your back on the ocean and Maceió becomes a different city. The Mundaú spreads out flat and brown-green behind the beachfront, its edges thick with mangrove, its water crossed by small boats belonging to people who fish and gather shellfish from it. This is the working half - the neighbourhoods where the lace comes from, where the canoes launch, where the lagoon's produce feeds the city's kitchens. Maceió is also a university town, home to the Federal University of Alagoas, and a reasonably well-connected one: a light-rail line, the Maceió Urban Rail, serves the city, and Zumbi dos Palmares International Airport, named for the leader of the quilombo in the hills inland, handled 1,893,812 passengers in 2021 with connections to Lisbon and Buenos Aires alongside the Brazilian network.

There is a wound in the middle of all this, and it is impossible to write about Maceió honestly without naming it. Since 2018, a slow subsidence traced to decades of rock-salt extraction beneath the city has emptied whole neighbourhoods - Pinheiro, Mutange, Bebedouro, Bom Parto and part of Farol - of tens of thousands of residents. Walk their streets now and you find intact houses with numbers still on the doors and nobody behind them. That story deserves its own telling rather than a paragraph here. What matters for the city is the shape of the loss: Maceió did not lose a suburb on the edge, it lost districts near its heart, and the map of where people live has been redrawn around a hole.