UXUA, BRAZIL
The sun sets quickly in Trancoso, on Brazil’s north-eastern coast. One moment it’s hanging over the quadrado, or town square, as brilliant white as the 16th-century church in its centre, the next it’s gone, replaced by a bright, shining moon.
But that’s about the only thing that moves fast in this serenely sleepy town, which is made up of a few rainbow-coloured adobe houses, a cluster of restaurants selling locally caught fish (poached piquantly with chilli salsa), a stretch of beach shimmering with amber sand, an Yves Klein-blue sea and that fast-sinking sun.
Trancoso has been dubbed the St Tropez of Brazil, but that does it a disservice. True, it attracts the fashionable and fabulous, having been a backdrop for the holiday snaps of Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss and designer Riccardo Tisci, but there are no luxury boutiques here, no super yachts cluttering the shoreline. Beyoncé used it as the base for her South American tour, but Trancoso’s vibe is far more Balearic, barefoot and bedheaded than that implies.
It’s the sort of place you retreat to when you want good weather, good food and a spiritual reset. For, like Ibiza, there’s a healing feeling in Trancoso: it winds itself like fairy lights around the trees of the quadrado, it rustles through the palm leaves like the monkeys that chatter happily. It’s in the way the townspeople gather at the end of each day on the hilltop overlooking the coast – to gossip, laugh and watch the moon rise. It has you feeling relaxed the moment you arrive. And nowhere is it more inherent than at Uxua, the 11-house hotel designed by Diesel’s former creative director Wilbert Das.
Each house, or casa, is separated from the rest by a carefully curated jungle, a knot of foliage and fronds. The look is luxe bohemian: whitewashed walls, artfully peeling paintwork, rustic window frames looking on to powder-blue skies. Hammocks sway on porches, stone cools underfoot, linen rustles expensively on huge reclaimed-wood beds. Uxua offers self-sufficiency for those who don’t actually want to have to do anything: breakfast is served by the pool during the civilised window of 8-11am, dinners of steak, mango salads and fried plantain are in the restaurant facing the quadrado, or brought to your house whenever you want, while the hotel-owned beach bar charges all-day beds and daiquiris back to your room. It’s hotel life without the feel of being in a hotel, but at the home of a friend you never really have to interact with. There’s a spa, where almescar oil is rubbed luxuriously into your limbs, and a gym, where the brave can try capoeira. And there’s that soothing spirit, the main draw, which means that a long journey to get there is truly worth the effort.
Trancoso is a delight, and Uxua is a destination in itself, a beautiful haven where you’ll realise you can read more books, nap more fulfillingly and take more than just a moment to utterly unwind. It still has that feeling of undiscovered, understated glamour, of being a place you’d have to know about to end up in, rather than it being just another stop on the standard holiday trail. ‘People say Trancoso chooses you, rather than the other way around,’ Uxua’s concierge, Carlos, tells me when I marvel at how relaxed I am feeling mere minutes after arrival. I hope it chooses you. You’ll love it, if it does. PIP MCCORMAC