Olinda

The highest point in the town, where the cathedral square takes in the sea together with the city next door. Stalls sell grilled cheese and coconut, and the evening brings people up.

The gilded altarpiece is carved as a single work and dates to the 1660s. At the Sunday morning mass the monks sing plainchant.

Figures over three metres tall are carried through the lanes by someone inside them. A workshop shows how they are built and keeps them on display outside carnival.

Houses along the lanes open as studios selling paintings and prints. An open door means you may walk in, and the artist explains the work.

Twenty minutes away, a port quarter of painted buildings joined by bridges. On Sunday cars are kept out and performances fill the squares.

A coral reef runs along the shore like a wall and takes the waves. At low tide pools form behind it and trap the fish.

An eighteenth century building where enslaved people were traded now sells crafts. A panel in the courtyard sets out that history.

A museum of the regional dance and music whose emblem is a small umbrella. Classes run in the basement and anyone can join one.

Founded in 1585 as the first Franciscan house in the country. Blue tiles along the cloister walls run through the life of the saint.

The beach carries on to the north, where fishermen pull timber rafts up onto the sand. Those rafts, under sail, still go out to fish.

A Carmelite church begun in the 1580s and counted as the order's oldest building in Brazil. Standing alone on a square below the hill, it is the first church you pass before the climb. The lane behind leads up toward Alto da Se.

An 18th-century church prison turned art museum. The thick-walled cells became galleries lit through small windows. Mostly it hangs artists from the region.

Founded in 1540 on the hilltop beside Alto da Se, its altar wrapped in gilded woodcarving. A convent adjoins it, so the doors may be shut outside Mass times. From the front steps you look down to the sea toward Recife.

Jesuits opened a college here in 1551, and it still trains priests. The church inside is plain, keeping the look of the earliest colonial churches. Beyond the far wall of the yard, mango trees and the sea share the view.

A star-shaped 18th-century fort up the coast from Olinda, guarding the beach where Dutch troops landed in 1630. From the walls you watch fishing boats come and go. It is a little beyond Janga Beach.