When Coutinho arrived, the land was already contested. The Goitacá held the south, the Aimoré ranged through the interior, and the Tupiniquim occupied the north. These were not a single people waiting to be displaced but three distinct nations with their own quarrels, their own territories, and their own names for the places the Portuguese were about to rename. The beach where Coutinho landed was Piratininga to the Tupiniquim. Resistance was immediate and continuous. Over the next century and a half, French privateers and Dutch forces also attacked, and the colony survived on the backs of enslaved indigenous and African people forced to work the sugar plantations. In what is now the Aribiri neighborhood, a quilombo - a community of people who had escaped slavery - took root in the forested hills. The quilombo eventually became a settlement, and the settlement became a neighborhood.

Perched on a granite outcrop overlooking the coast, the Penha Convent was constructed between the 16th and 17th centuries and remains one of Espírito Santo's most recognized landmarks. The National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage designated it a national cultural heritage site in 1943. Every year during Festa da Penha - Brazil's third-largest religious event, held in honor of Our Lady of Peñafrancia - pilgrims climb the hill to reach the convent. Other historical survivors from the same era include the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary, the Fort of São Francisco Xavier de Piratininga, and the Santa Luzia Lighthouse. For a city that was overshadowed for 400 years by its neighbor across the bay, Vila Velha has quietly kept more of its colonial fabric intact than Vitória ever did.

Serious economic growth didn't arrive until the late 1920s, when the Florentino Ávidos Bridge finally connected Vila Velha to Vitória. Before the bridge, the bay kept the old capital isolated. After it, Vila Velha began absorbing the overflow of a capital that was running out of land. Today the city is the second-most populous in Espírito Santo, surpassed only by Serra, and its port terminals handle roughly 90 percent of the state's exports. Garment manufacturing, commerce, and real estate drive the modern economy. The Greater Vitória Metropolitan Area, established by state law in 1995, now contains more than 1.68 million people across seven municipalities - the 14th largest urban agglomeration in Brazil - and Vila Velha forms the southern anchor of that metropolis.

Vila Velha's coastline runs 32 kilometers along the Atlantic, almost entirely lined with beaches. Praia da Costa, Itapoã, and Itaparica are the most developed stretches, drawing tourists from across Brazil during the summer months. The Jucu River, which begins up in the mountains around Domingos Martins, empties into the Atlantic within Vila Velha's municipal boundary, and its confluence with the sea occasionally forms small tidal bores during certain seasons. The climate is tropical hot super-humid - dry, mild winters and rainy summers - though cold fronts can bring wind gusts above 70 km/h. The lowest temperature ever recorded at the Fazenda Paraíso weather station was 9.1°C on May 19, 2022. The highest: 37.4°C on March 14, 2019. Extreme cold is rare. Extreme heat less so.

Chocolates Garoto, founded locally in 1929, is one of Vila Velha's oldest industries and the focus of an annual Chocolate Festival that draws visitors who come for the candy and stay for the coastline. Between the Festa da Penha in the late summer months and the Jesus Vida Verão festival during the Brazilian summer, the city cycles through religious and secular celebrations that bring the long colonial history into direct contact with modern tourism. Coutinho's small village, founded on a Pentecost Sunday to honor the descent of the Holy Spirit, is now a city of chocolate factories, container terminals, and crowded beaches. The caravel Glória is long gone. The fort still stands.