🇧🇷 Brazil · Northeast
Praia do Forte is a beach village on the northern coast of Bahia, a little over an hour from Salvador, famous as the home of Projeto Tamar, Brazil's sea turtle conservation initiative. Its charming pedestrian centre —the Alameda do Sol, or Vila de Praia do Forte— packs shops, restaurants and pousadas into a relaxed setting, steps from calm beaches with natural pools at low tide.
Beyond Tamar, Praia do Forte offers the Castelo Garcia d'Ávila (the ruins of a 16th-century colonial castle), Atlantic forest reserves, mangroves and humpback whale watching in season. It's a pleasant family destination and an ideal base for exploring the Costa dos Coqueiros and the Linha Verde, with their coconut-palm beaches running north to the Sergipe border.
This guide covers the essentials of Praia do Forte with a practical eye: Projeto Tamar, the Castelo Garcia d'Ávila, the beaches and natural pools, how to get here from Salvador, where to eat and sleep, and how to make the most of turtle and whale season.
Praia do Forte stands on land that belonged to the old Casa da Torre de Garcia d'Ávila, one of the largest estates in colonial America, whose 16th-century castle still stands in ruins on a rise. For centuries it was an area of fishing villages tied to coconut. In 1980 the main base of Projeto Tamar, the sea turtle conservation programme, was set up here, turning the village into a benchmark for ecotourism in the Northeast. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The cradle of Brazil: this is where Cabral landed in 1500 and where Salvador was founded, the country's first capital for more than two centuries. The heart of Afro-Brazilian culture —candomblé, capoeira, axé— and of a coastline that runs from the Chapada Diamantina to the beaches of Porto Seguro.
Read the history of Bahia →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The history of Praia do Forte is inseparably tied to one of the most powerful figures of colonial Brazil: Garcia d'Ávila. He arrived in Bahia alongside Tomé de Sousa, Brazil's first governor general, in 1549, and over the 16th century amassed a colossal landholding. His domain, known as the Casa da Torre, came to cover immense stretches of northeastern Brazil, in what was one of the largest estates in all of colonial America.
On a rise overlooking the coast, Garcia d'Ávila had a fortified stone residence built, the so-called Castelo Garcia d'Ávila, erected in Mannerist style through the second half of the 16th century. Beside the fortified house stood the chapel of Nossa Senhora da Conceição. This building is considered Brazil's only medieval-Renaissance castle and one of the oldest surviving examples of Portuguese colonial architecture in the country.
From that tower and its lands, the family ran cattle, farming and the push inland across the Northeast. The name "Praia do Forte" itself refers to that fortified presence on the coast. Today the castle ruins, restored and open to visitors, offer a window onto the beginnings of the region's colonization and the almost feudal power the d'Ávila family wielded for generations.
Over the centuries, the power of the Casa da Torre declined and its immense lands were broken up. The Praia do Forte area remained a coastal region given over to small-scale fishing and coconut growing, dotted with small coastal communities living to the rhythm of the sea and of the Atlantic forest that covered much of the northern Bahian coast.
For a long time this stretch of coast —today known as the Costa dos Coqueiros— stayed relatively isolated and undeveloped, far from tourist circuits and from Salvador's urban sprawl. Local people kept a traditional way of life, and the coconut-palm beaches, the mangroves and the reefs remained practically untouched, while Garcia d'Ávila's castle stood in ruins on the rise, a silent witness to past splendour.
That combination of preserved nature and historical inheritance would, in time, be the foundation of Praia do Forte's tourist transformation. The beauty of its calm beaches, its natural pools and its Atlantic forest setting would prove especially valuable when, in the 20th century, the region began to be viewed through the lens of conservation and sustainable tourism development.
The great milestone of Praia do Forte's recent history was the arrival of Projeto Tamar. Created in the late 1970s to protect threatened sea turtles along the Brazilian coast, TAMAR (from "tartarugas marinhas") set up one of its main bases at Praia do Forte in 1980. The choice was no accident: the region's beaches were nesting grounds for several species of sea turtle, seriously threatened by capture and by the plundering of their nests.
The project combined research and turtle protection with a strong element of environmental education and work with local communities, offering fishermen economic alternatives. Its visitor centre, with tanks and displays, became a first-rate tourist attraction, able to bring together conservation, science and enjoyment. Praia do Forte thus became a national symbol of ecotourism and of marine wildlife protection.
From then on, the village went through rapid tourist development, but largely oriented towards a model of ecotourism and family beach holidays: pousadas, resorts, an attractive pedestrian village and nature outings such as whale watching and the trails of the Sapiranga Reserve. The combination of the historic castle, the beaches with their natural pools and the emblematic Projeto Tamar established Praia do Forte as one of the best-loved and most representative destinations on the northern coast of Bahia.
Beyond the fortified tower on the coast, the Casa da Torre of Garcia d'Ávila and his descendants came to control one of the largest landholdings in the history of Portuguese America. Through Crown grants, purchases and, above all, an aggressive cattle-driven expansion inland, the d'Ávila family accumulated lands that, by the widest estimates, covered enormous portions of northeastern Brazil, from Bahia to the banks of the São Francisco and Parnaíba rivers and further north.
This almost feudal domain rested on cattle raising, which pushed inland opening the sertão to colonization, and on the labour of enslaved people and subjugated indigenous groups. The d'Ávilas financed and led military and exploratory expeditions —including campaigns against indigenous groups and against the Quilombo dos Palmares— in the violent frontier logic typical of colonial expansion. Through the 16th and 17th centuries, the Casa da Torre was a genuine private power within colonial Brazil.
Over time, land disputes, lawsuits, inheritance divisions and economic change eroded that power. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the estate had fragmented and the family's influence had waned. The castle, abandoned, was left as a romantic ruin on the coast, while the memory of that cattle empire faded. Today, the restored ruins are the visible trace of a little-known but decisive chapter in the territorial formation of Brazil.
Praia do Forte's standing as the capital of Bahian ecotourism rests on two great symbols of marine conservation: turtles and whales. Projeto Tamar, based in the village since 1980, turned beaches that had been the setting for turtle capture and egg collecting into protected nesting grounds. Over the decades, the programme helped recover the populations of several threatened species (such as the loggerhead, green, hawksbill and olive ridley turtles) and became an international model of conservation with community participation.
To that story was added, in the 21st century, the rise of humpback whale watching (baleias jubarte). Every year, roughly between July and November, these cetaceans migrate from Antarctic waters to the warm coast of the Northeast to breed and raise their calves. The coast of Praia do Forte and of the Abrolhos Bank, further south, became one of the best places in Brazil to watch them, giving rise to a regulated watching industry and to awareness campaigns about marine wildlife.
This double legacy —the historical heritage of the Casa da Torre and the natural heritage of turtles, whales, mangroves and Atlantic forest— defines Praia do Forte's contemporary identity. The village balances tourist growth with preservation, in a model that, despite its tensions (property pressure, seasonality, environmental impact), remains a benchmark for sustainable tourism on the northern coast of Bahia.