Quilombo do Grotão, one of the most traditional spaces of black culture in Rio de Janeiro, will have its presence on the internet and social media redesigned. The intention is to attract more and more visitors, increasing the reach of foreign tourists. The initiative is from EmbraturLAB, in partnership between Embratur and Sebrae.
Located in Engenho do Mato, in Niterói, Quilombo do Grotão promotes a series of activities, from workshops with medicinal herbs for soap production to percussion, capoeira and crafts classes, and since 2003 it has become a reference space for samba and gastronomy.
“I was very pleased that our work was being recognized”, says the president of the Association of the Traditional Community of Engenho do Mato, José Renato Gomes da Costa, known as Renatão do Quilombo, who is the grandson of Manoel Bonfim and Maria Vicência, who has been 100 years they arrived in Grotão to occupy that territory.
He says that the quilombo has a frequent presence of visitors, especially when there is feijoada. “We have artisanal, musical work, the feijoada itself. The quilombo’s flagship product is beans. And our handicrafts, which people, visitors eat, take, buy. And plus the samba circle”, he says.
According to Renatão, during visits, the community seeks to share the history of the place, its experience and ancestry.
“We light the lamps. We don’t put in electricity. We try to bring people from the city back a little to 50, 60 years ago. And our samba circle is under the light of the lamp”, he says.
For foreigners who visit the site, they have supporters who take care of the translation into English, so that they understand what is being exposed.
Digital presence
Now, with EmbraturLAB, on the internet, the story and experience will arrive in other languages in searches made on Google and on social networks, such as Instagram. The intention is for the content to be more accessible to an international audience and also more attractive to a national audience.
According to Renatão, a first workshop has already been held in the quilombo, in which a proposed communication strategy was presented. The community is collecting images and the history of the place to transform into content for social media. THE Instagramfor example, which is one of the main means of promoting quilombo, will get a new look.
“The action is part of our project to increase the commercial performance of micro and small companies in the tourism sector with the use of free or low-cost digital tools, such as Google and TikTok. The goal is to expand the reach of products and services, qualify offers and increase the revenue of these small companies. These digital platforms are fundamental because they directly impact foreign tourists”, says Marcelo Freixo, president of Embratur.
Discover Quilombo do Grotão
According to information collected by Embratur, the history of Quilombo do Grotão dates back to the early 1920s, when Manoel Bonfim and Maria Vicência, descendants of black people enslaved in Sergipe, left the Northeast of Brazil to work on Irene’s Engenho do Mato Farm. Lopes Sodré, which produced flour, bananas and fruit and vegetables on a large scale.
In the 1950s, the business went bankrupt, and Manoel and Maria gained around two and a half bushels of land, in addition to two thousand banana seedlings to start their lives over, as compensation from the Sodré family. The conquest of the territory is marked by a struggle for land, especially with the creation of the Serra da Tiririca State Park in 1991.
Renatão then decided to create the famous samba circle with the traditional feijoada, which has ensured the family’s permanence in the territory for 20 years. In 2016, the territory was officially certified as a quilombo by the Palmares Foundation, of the Ministry of Culture.
What are quilombos?
According to the Palmares Foundation, quilombo, in the Bantu language, means village. It was the physical space of resistance to slavery. Fleeing from coffee plantations and sugar cane plantations, black people who refused to submit to, exploit, and be subjected to the violence of the colonial slave system gathered in the forests and formed housing centers with a relative degree of organization and social, economic and social development. political.
These were groups created in difficult to access locations, and which had weapons and defense strategies against the invasion of militias and government troops. The 2022 Demographic Census showed that the quilombola population residing in Brazil is 1,327,802 peoplecorresponding to 0.65% of the population. There are 1,696 municipalities with a quilombola population and 473,970 permanent private households with quilombola residents.
For Renatão, maintaining this memory is one of his main concerns. “It’s our people, right? During this post-abolition period and to this day, black people have great difficulty participating in society. Of a just society. And the idea of quilombo today is to preserve all this history and tell this whole story”, he explains.
He recalls that in Brazil, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), 55.5% of the population Brazilian woman identifies as black or brown.
“It’s for our young people to have courage. We are trying to give a boost to our kids, our youth, so that they can really embrace color. We are encouraging these children, teenagers, to speak. When they say ‘Ah, what are you? I’m black. This is the big idea of quilombo, today, here in the city”, he says.
