Sergipe ranks last among Brazil's twenty-six states by area and is divided into just seventy-five municipalities. The 2022 census counted 2,210,004 residents, packed at roughly a hundred people per square kilometre. That works out to about 1.1 percent of Brazil's population living on a fraction of a percent of its territory and producing something on the order of 0.6 percent of national GDP.

The land changes fast as you move inland. The coast is a wet edge of mangrove, swamp and sandy beach, backed by a thin surviving ribbon of Atlantic rainforest. Behind that comes the agreste, the transitional belt where humid coast negotiates with dry interior. Push west and the negotiation ends: caatinga takes over, the grey thorn forest of the Brazilian sertão, which looks dead for most of the year and turns green within days of rain.

In the seventeenth century Sergipe was known across the Americas for a single commodity. Kingwood, the dense violet-streaked timber of Dalbergia cearensis, was valuable enough to bring French buccaneers raiding along this coast repeatedly, and it was probably a factor in the Dutch military expeditions that followed.

The Dutch got what they came for. From 1641 to 1645 the territory belonged to Dutch-controlled Brazil, and they built the region's first fort on the ground between the São Francisco and Sergipe rivers. The Portuguese took it all back in 1645. Driving off the privateers took considerably longer, and it was not until the eighteenth century that the Portuguese military finally made this coast unprofitable for them.

By 1723 this small territory, still administered as part of Bahia, was producing a third of Bahia's sugar. Cane filled the river valleys — the São Francisco, Japaratuba, Sergipe, Vaza-Barris, Piauí and Real — and colonial Brazilian sugar ran on the forced labour of enslaved Africans. Land that would not take cane took cattle instead. Sergipe became a supplier of draft animals to the farms of Bahia and Pernambuco, and a significant producer of leather.

Separation came by royal signature. John VI of Portugal signed the decree detaching Sergipe from Bahia on 8 July 1820, and Brigadier Carlos César Burlamárqui became its first governor. The demographic shape of the sugar coast is still legible two centuries later: the 2022 census recorded 61.6 percent of Sergipanos as pardo, 25.2 percent as white and 12.8 percent as Black.

The far west of the state is another country. At Canindé do São Francisco, where Sergipe, Bahia and Alagoas meet, the river has cut a gorge through bare rock, and the reservoir behind the Xingó dam now fills it to a flat, improbable blue. Boats run between stone walls in a landscape where the surrounding scrub can go most of the year without meaningful rain.

This is the same river that waters the cane downstream and marks the entire northern boundary of the state. Sergipe is small enough that its wettest and driest extremes sit within a few hours of each other, and Sergipanos treat the contrast as ordinary.

Petroleum turned up at Carmópolis in 1963, and Sergipe has been among Brazil's oil-producing states ever since, currently ranking fifth. Industry now accounts for a little over half of state GDP. The older economy has not gone anywhere: more than two million tonnes of sugarcane in 2018, 234 million coconuts in 2017, 354,000 tonnes of oranges.

And the state still keeps its first capital. São Cristóvão, founded in the sixteenth century, is the fourth-oldest town in Brazil, and its Praça São Francisco — an open square framed by church, convent and colonial houses — was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2010. It is a quiet place now. For nearly three hundred years it ran everything.