Millions of Brazilians can picture Santana do Agreste, the little coastal town where Tieta came home in triumph. It never existed. Forty-six buildings, two churches, eight streets, two squares, an abandoned circus and fifteen ruins were constructed for the cameras at Guaratiba, in Rio de Janeiro, more than a thousand kilometres south of the coast the story was set on. What was real — and what viewers actually remember — is the sand. The white dunes, the empty beach and the light came from Mangue Seco, a fishing village of a couple hundred people at the northern tip of Bahia.
Jorge Amado published Tieta do Agreste in 1977, a novel about a woman who leaves a small northeastern town in disgrace and returns rich, generous and entirely unrepentant. TV Globo's adaptation — written by Aguinaldo Silva, Ricardo Linhares and Ana Maria Moretzsohn — ran from 14 August 1989 to 30 March 1990, with Betty Faria in the title role and a theme song by the Bahian musician Luiz Caldas. A feature film followed in 1996. For a village whose whole population would not fill a bus, the effect of a nightly national broadcast was permanent: Mangue Seco stopped being a place only fishermen knew and became a place people set out to find.
Amado was born in Itabuna, in the cacao country of southern Bahia, on 10 August 1912, and he spent a working life of nearly seventy years setting fiction in his home state: Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon in 1958, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands in 1966, Tieta do Agreste in 1977. He joined the Communist Party in 1932, served a term as a federal deputy, and was pushed into exile in Argentina, Uruguay and France before returning home in 1954. His books have since been translated into some forty-nine languages, which is to say that Bahia has been read by an enormous number of people who will never stand on it. He took the twenty-third chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1961 and held it until he died in Salvador on 6 August 2001.
Geographically, Mangue Seco is the last of Bahia. The village belongs to the municipality of Jandaíra and sits beside the Rio Real, the river that marks the border with Sergipe. Salvador is 250 kilometres away down the Linha Verde coastal highway, but the practical approach is from the north: Aracaju is about eighty kilometres off, and since the Ponte Joel Silveira opened across the Rio Vaza-Barris in 2010, driving the southern Sergipe coast has got considerably easier. The last stage cannot be driven at all. You cross the Rio Real by boat — a fifteen-minute run from Porto do Mato, Terra Caída or Pontal — and step out onto sand.
The name translates as dry mangrove, and there is no asphalt to arrive on. The village lanes are white sand, coconut palms lean over them, and behind the houses the dunes rise in long pale ridges that shift with the wind. The permanent population does not exceed a couple of hundred people, and fishing is still what most of them do. Buggies run tourists over the dunes, a small church holds the plaza, and pousadas and beach bars handle the visitors who make the crossing. It is a place with more sand than street, and the boat trip that keeps it inconvenient is precisely what has kept it small.
Plenty of famous places have been ruined by their own reputations. Mangue Seco has been protected by geography from most of that: nobody arrives by accident, and a village you can only reach by water sets a natural limit on how many people are standing on the beach at once. What Amado's story and Globo's cameras gave it was not development so much as recognition — the odd status of a national landmark with a three-digit population. The dunes people came to see are the same dunes that were there in 1989, and they will keep moving with the wind whether or not anyone is filming.
Mangue Seco lies at 11.46°S, 37.37°W, at the mouth of the Rio Real on the Bahia–Sergipe boundary. From the air the landmarks are exceptionally clear: a bright field of white dunes pressed between the Atlantic and the dark meander of the Rio Real, mangrove channels braiding inland, and the abrupt line where Bahia's coconut coast becomes Sergipe's. Santa Maria Airport at Aracaju (SBAR) is about 60 km northeast; Salvador's Deputado Luís Eduardo Magalhães International (SBSV) is roughly 200 km southwest. Fly the coast at 1,000–2,500 ft AGL for the dune field and the estuary together. Sea breeze and blowing sand build through the afternoon; early morning gives the sharpest definition on the dune ridges.