Uxua Casa Hotel&Spa

In the coastal village of Trancoso in southern Bahia, UXUA Casa Hotel & Spa occupies a collection of seventeenth-century casas around the Quadrado — the village’s UNESCO-protected green square — restored and transformed into nine individual houses and a pool villa, each designed with a specific personality and a design philosophy that treats the restoration of vernacular Bahian architecture as the primary cultural act rather than the creation of luxury amenities. The Quadrado’s ochre-painted chapels, the enormous ficus tree at its centre, and the surrounding palm-thatched restaurants and artisan studios give Trancoso a quality of preserved historic village character — the community where hippies, intellectuals, and eventually Brazil’s creative and fashion elite established their winter enclave from the 1970s onwards — that the luxury hotels of the broader Bahian coast have gradually diluted in their rush to scale. UXUA’s commitment to the village’s character has made it the most serious custodian of what Trancoso has always represented.

The restaurant’s menus draw on the Bahian culinary tradition — the dendê palm oil, the seafood moquecas, the acarajé preparations, and the coconut-based sauces of the Afro-Brazilian kitchen that constitute one of Brazil’s most distinctive and culturally significant regional cuisines — in a cooking programme connected to the fishing community and the artisan producers of the village and its surrounding coconut grove landscape. The spa’s programme draws on Indigenous Brazilian healing traditions and the local botanical resources of the Bahian Atlantic forest. Kite surfing and surfing on the Trancoso coast’s beaches, walking along the cliffs of the Parque Nacional do Descobrimento, and boat excursions to the offshore reefs are among the primary activities.

UXUA’s relationship with the Trancoso community is expressed through the UXUA Foundation’s work supporting the traditional craftsmanship of the local Pataxó indigenous community, whose weaving and embroidery traditions supply both the hotel’s textile programme and the Foundation’s artisan development initiatives.