There’s something wrong here, you think the first time you see Trancoso’s Quadrado. Here it is, noontime, the sky above you white with sun, and you’re standing in the main square of this little 16th century town, a five-acre rectangle of lawn marked at the far end by a simple church made of coral blocks and whale bones. On either side of you are little adobe houses, former fishermen's cottages, each painted the truer-than-true colors of a rain-forest jungle—heliconia red, toucan-beak orange, tree-frog green, bromeliad pink—their facades nearly obscured by stalks of banana trees and clumps of torch ginger. And yet there's not a soul in sight. The houses' white shutters are closed. No one sits on the benches and tables that clutter the grass outside many of the houses; no one plays soccer on the little pitch by the church; there's nowhere to eat, no one to see. It feels as if the entire town of 9,900 people has taken off, en masse, for a party to which you’ve not been invited—because why else, then, would you leave someplace so beautiful?

And then you take a ten-minute stroll, turning right onto the dirt path just before the church and crossing a short, slatted-wood bridge that cuts through a mangrove swamp, and you realize that there is in fact a good reason to leave someplace beautiful, and that’s if you can go somewhere more beautiful: Trancoso’s beach, a nearly 15-mile stretch of sand the color of unpolished gold, facing water so clear that even when it’s at chin height you can still look down and see your toes. Like many perfect beach towns, Trancoso has a sort of out-of-time quality, largely because time itself has no meaning here. When the sun is up, you go to the beach. You spend all day there, splashing in the water, baking on the sand. And when the sky begins to turn the color of those heliconia-red houses, you heave yourself to your feet and walk back uphill, where you discover that—surprise!—in your absence, the Quadrado has come alive, the doors flung open, the tables set with white china, the paper lanterns which lace through the monkeypod trees switched on, and that the party has migrated from the beach to the grass and, despite what you feared, you’ve been invited after all.

I first went to Trancoso in 2009. It was my first trip to Brazil, and I had added it as a sort of afterthought, a semi-spontaneous 700-mile detour north as I traveled from Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo. The town occupies a speck of coast in Bahia, the country’s fourth most populous state and one of the earliest to be settled by the sixteenth-century Portuguese explorers who went on to define modern Brazil. It is something of an anomaly in vast, jungly Bahia, remarkable even in this wildly diverse country for its ethnic jambalaya, its air of perpetual and inescapable languor, and its relative wealth.

But if Trancoso is distinct, it is also somehow familiar, and on that initial visit, it felt oddly like someplace I’d been before. It took me a day or so to realize that it wasn’t so much the town’s appearance or physical dimensions that were recognizable but rather its particular blend of glamour and lassitude, preening and insouciance, money and a collective decision to pretend money doesn’t matter at all, that I remembered from other beach towns I had visited and loved for those very contradictory qualities: Tulum, Hana, José Ignacio. Like them, Trancoso is defined by a carefully cultivated (and convincing) sense of mutually sustained fantasy. It’s a town that’s been anointed by the fashion set as somewhere they can see everyone they know while also imagining that here, finally, is a place where no one cares who you are. It’s a town where the vastly rich can pretend that no one understands just how rich they are. It’s a town where you can buy a fresh-made guava-and-coconut-stuffed tapioca crêpe from a dilapidated wooden stall at the end of the Quadrado (cost: one real, about a quarter) and follow it with a blindingly strong Negroni back at your hotel (cost: 20 reals), and in your mind, this is what you’d be eating every day. Which is to say: This is a fantasy of not just a vacation town but of a vacation itself. Here, the artifice is all part of the fun of escape.

There’s something wrong here, you think the first time you see Trancoso’s Quadrado. Here it is, noontime, the sky above you white with sun, and you’re standing in the main square of this little 16th century town, a five-acre rectangle of lawn marked at the far end by a simple church made of coral blocks and whale bones. On either side of you are little adobe houses, former fishermen's cottages, each painted the truer-than-true colors of a rain-forest jungle—heliconia red, toucan-beak orange, tree-frog green, bromeliad pink—their facades nearly obscured by stalks of banana trees and clumps of torch ginger. And yet there's not a soul in sight. The houses' white shutters are closed. No one sits on the benches and tables that clutter the grass outside many of the houses; no one plays soccer on the little pitch by the church; there's nowhere to eat, no one to see. It feels as if the entire town of 9,900 people has taken off, en masse, for a party to which you’ve not been invited—because why else, then, would you leave someplace so beautiful?

And then you take a ten-minute stroll, turning right onto the dirt path just before the church and crossing a short, slatted-wood bridge that cuts through a mangrove swamp, and you realize that there is in fact a good reason to leave someplace beautiful, and that’s if you can go somewhere more beautiful: Trancoso’s beach, a nearly 15-mile stretch of sand the color of unpolished gold, facing water so clear that even when it’s at chin height you can still look down and see your toes. Like many perfect beach towns, Trancoso has a sort of out-of-time quality, largely because time itself has no meaning here. When the sun is up, you go to the beach. You spend all day there, splashing in the water, baking on the sand. And when the sky begins to turn the color of those heliconia-red houses, you heave yourself to your feet and walk back uphill, where you discover that—surprise!—in your absence, the Quadrado has come alive, the doors flung open, the tables set with white china, the paper lanterns which lace through the monkeypod trees switched on, and that the party has migrated from the beach to the grass and, despite what you feared, you’ve been invited after all.

I first went to Trancoso in 2009. It was my first trip to Brazil, and I had added it as a sort of afterthought, a semi-spontaneous 700-mile detour north as I traveled from Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo. The town occupies a speck of coast in Bahia, the country’s fourth most populous state and one of the earliest to be settled by the sixteenth-century Portuguese explorers who went on to define modern Brazil. It is something of an anomaly in vast, jungly Bahia, remarkable even in this wildly diverse country for its ethnic jambalaya, its air of perpetual and inescapable languor, and its relative wealth.

But if Trancoso is distinct, it is also somehow familiar, and on that initial visit, it felt oddly like someplace I’d been before. It took me a day or so to realize that it wasn’t so much the town’s appearance or physical dimensions that were recognizable but rather its particular blend of glamour and lassitude, preening and insouciance, money and a collective decision to pretend money doesn’t matter at all, that I remembered from other beach towns I had visited and loved for those very contradictory qualities: Tulum, Hana, José Ignacio. Like them, Trancoso is defined by a carefully cultivated (and convincing) sense of mutually sustained fantasy. It’s a town that’s been anointed by the fashion set as somewhere they can see everyone they know while also imagining that here, finally, is a place where no one cares who you are. It’s a town where the vastly rich can pretend that no one understands just how rich they are. It’s a town where you can buy a fresh-made guava-and-coconut-stuffed tapioca crêpe from a dilapidated wooden stall at the end of the Quadrado (cost: one real, about a quarter) and follow it with a blindingly strong Negroni back at your hotel (cost: 20 reals), and in your mind, this is what you’d be eating every day. Which is to say: This is a fantasy of not just a vacation town but of a vacation itself. Here, the artifice is all part of the fun of escape.But why Trancoso? Brazil, after all, has a 7,500-mile coastline from top to bottom, which means there are literally thousands of pretty beaches, thousands of potentially pretty villages. Why, then, has Trancoso become the sort of place that, from Christmas to Easter, sees its population swell as Paulistas and Cariocans—each of them possessing that signature tan, that signature litheness, which seem to be the wealthy Brazilian’s birthright—buzz into town in their private helicopters? Why does fashion heiress Georgina Brandolini d’Adda have a house here? Why has Anderson Cooper bought a plot of land right on the Quadrado? Why, during Brazil’s mild winters, does Instagram fill with images of the little white São João Batista Church? How, in other words, did Trancoso become Trancoso?

“It was because of the hippies,” Wilbert Das told me on my most recent visit. The former creative director of Diesel now owns Uxua Casa Hotel & Spa, occupying a group of 11 refurbished houses on the Quadrado. “They came to Trancoso in the late seventies and ended up reviving it.” When the first tourists arrived, Das said, the town was on the edge of extinction: The geography that makes Trancoso so desirable today—a relatively small bay hemmed in by tropical forest so dense that it made the area impassable, unsuited to ever becoming a real port city—also isolated it. “It was closed off for 500 years,” he said. “In 1978, there were only 50 families left here. Electricity didn’t even arrive until 1982. The twentysomething generation was having to leave to look for work.”

“But then the first hippies arrived,” added Das’s business partner, Bob Shevlin. “They were Swiss, Argentinian, Russian, Italian, French, Brazilian. They saw and appreciated the town for what it was, and they made the people who live here appreciate it, too. It was the hippies who blocked the Quadrado to all traffic; they were the ones who saw something to preserve. There’s this cliché that tourism cheapens a place, but here, tourism saved it.”

Of course, those hippies are now rich. Later, as I walked down the packed-earth path to the beach, I passed a property—at least four houses deep and hidden from view by a tall wooden fence—that Das (who, though a relatively recent arrival, is today something of the unofficial town mayor) told me was bought “for nothing” by one of the early hippie settlers in the ’70s. And if the hippies—now in their sixties, cheerful and leathery from decades of paradisal living—are responsible for the town’s current incarnation, they’ve also insured that Trancoso will never go the way of Waikiki or Punta del Este, once-intimate beach communities that today are dominated by condos and overrun by package tours. Although Trancoso has a Relais & Châteaux property and there is talk of a much-delayed beachfront resort being developed by the South American hotel group Fasano, most of its hotels are independently owned B&Bs of varying levels of quality and chic within walking distance of the beach. “It’s just gotten too expensive for developers to build here,” said Shevlin. “Each of our neighbors—each of those bright-colored houses—is worth millions of dollars in land alone. A large corporation would never recoup its investment, which means Trancoso will never get bigger than it is.” Add to this strict zoning laws which specify that no structure can be built higher than two stories and you have, he says, a place which has saved itself through its own desirability.

Then there’s the alchemy of the town itself, which both men said would vanish were it to become something larger. “The locals and the hippies and artists have always gotten along,” said Das. “They created their own aesthetic and made this their paradise; the culture of one contaminated the other. Let’s face it, the best places on earth were founded by hippies and artists.”

It is also hippies and artists who—unfairly or not—have a reputation for being masters of indolence, and in Trancoso, it’s alarmingly easy to honor their legacy by taking the art of dolce far niente to new heights. I’m not exactly the most motivated of people to begin with, but after two days at Uxua, I was moving more slowly, and less frequently, than the giant silvery sloth that occasionally appears on the hotel’s property.

Days began with one of the hotel’s tropical-island-fantasy breakfasts: a variety of fresh-squeezed juices so thick and pulpy that the contents of each pitcher (guava, passion fruit, and mango one day; papaya, watermelon, lime, and banana the next) had to be stirred with a long hardwood stick before pouring; pão de queijo (little blobs of chewy, yielding dough baked with cheese, and—unfortunately—just the right size for popping, whole, into the mouth); empanadas stuffed with chocolate or fresh coconut cream; and, best of all, the day’s cake (coconut glazed white with citrus icing; a dense, vanilla-scented chocolate Bundt; a lime-and-orange loaf with a biting, tart crust). After breakfast—at which I was always the only one (my fellow guests, most of them the aforementioned rich Brazilians, as well as Italians and French, didn’t seem to get up until noon)—I walked down to the beach, where Uxua has a bar made from an old wooden fisherman’s boat. I drank. I read my book. I swam, the water beneath me the same limpid pale-blue as the sky, the horizon line that divided the two blurring so completely that at times it felt as if I were suspended in some imaginary state halfway between the water and the air (though that could also have been the drunkenness). When the light began to dim—the sunsets in Trancoso, as in all equatorial locations, are brilliant but brief—I stumbled back up to the just-rousing town, into the shower, and then out onto the green again to find the crêpe vendor. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done less—or the last time I’d done things less familiar, things I would never have done back home in New York. Day drinking. Waving at strangers. Eating cake for breakfast. On my second to last day, I took a drive with Das down a bumpy dirt road to what I’d remembered—accurately—as the most beautiful beach in the world: Praia do Espelho, or Mirror Beach, so named because at low tide, the water seems to pleat back from the shore, and the sand becomes a series of shallow tide pools, so still and clear and perfectly reflective that for a moment you think you might be having a vision. After splashing around for a while, we waded across one of the estuaries to Restaurante da Sylvinha, a cheery fish shack that serves the freshest catch and pleasantly dizzying drinks made with tropical fruit and (lots of) icy vodka.

That sense of improbability the town provoked made me realize then that maybe the Trancosan fantasy of no one caring who you are or how much money you have wasn’t such a fantasy after all. This seems a strange thing to say in Brazil. Even in an increasingly inequitable world, the country’s economic gap is severe: The richest one percent of the population, collectively, have as much money as the poorest 50 percent; there is no avoiding the country’s poverty.

But there was a funny kind of democracy at work here as well, something as ephemeral as it was undeniable. As someone who grew up in a well-visited beach town—Honolulu—I’m always skeptical of claims that locals and tourists mix seamlessly, and with mutual respect. But it really did seem to be the case in Trancoso: There was none of the cultural apartheid I felt when, as a child, I knew that certain beaches, certain stores, certain restaurants, were off-limits to me—they were for the tourists, and I was a local. On Trancoso’s beach, however, I watched as women I knew were rich—from their accessories, their clothes, their whiteness—talked, casually and at length, with the vendors (mostly black) who were strolling the sand, selling homemade coconut oil, foot massages, and trinkets. Between them there was a sense of, if not equality, then at least community, of belonging, of ev- eryone’s fundamental right to the beach itself. And indeed, once you were in the water, you couldn’t tell who was rich and who was poor: We were a series of bobbing heads, lolling there like seals—the sea be- longed to us all. I couldn’t imagine a scene like this in the Hamptons, or anywhere else, really. But here in Trancoso, I found it.