Where to Stay in Olinda, Pernambuco

What is Olinda known for?

Sixteenth and seventeenth century building stock earned Olinda its UNESCO World Heritage listing, and the density of it is the point, with convents, chapels and merchant houses packed onto the slopes instead of scattered through a modern city. The carnival is the other claim. Bars, restaurants and the studios of artists and craftspeople work the same old-town streets through the rest of the year, and Alto da Sé sits at the top of them.

Few Brazilian centres survive this intact.

What are the main landmarks in Olinda?

In Olinda the churches outnumber all else. Sixteen appear on the record, among them the Basilica and Monastery of St. Benedict, the Convent of San Francisco, the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary of the Black People and the Church of Our Lady of the Mount. Collections take over from there.

Pernambuco Museum of Sacred Art, the Pernambuco Contemporary Art Museum and the Mamulengo Museum divide the collections three ways, and the Ruínas do Senado are what survives of an older civic building.

What is the history of Olinda?

Settlement here dates from 1535. Olinda counts among the best-preserved colonial cities in Brazil, and the sixteenth and seventeenth century fabric that earned it a UNESCO World Heritage listing is what a visitor walks through rather than reads about. Religious orders did most of the building.

The Convent of San Francisco, the Convento e Igreja de Nossa Senhora do Carmo, the Church and Convent of Saint Teresa and the Church of Our Lady of Grace of the Jesuits' College mark out which order held which piece of ground. Not every church served the same congregation. The Church of Our Lady of the Rosary of the Black People and the Church of Saint John the Baptist of the Military stand for two separate communities inside one small municipality, and the Church of Our Lady of the Mount keeps the high ground above them both.

Civic buildings fared worse. Ruínas do Senado is a ruin by name, while Alto da Sé held onto its role as the meeting point of the upper town, and the Pernambuco Museum of Sacred Art keeps indoors what the parishes once held. Carnival carried the rest forward.

The streets that fill for it are the same ones the orders laid out, which is why Olinda reads as a working town instead of a preserved one.

Where is Olinda?

Olinda is small and steep. The municipality covers roughly 42 square kilometres on the Atlantic coast of Pernambuco, packed tightly enough that its old town, its churches and its museums all fall inside one continuous walk. Recife adjoins it.

Both belong to the Metropolitan Region of Recife, and the boundary between them is a street rather than any stretch of open country, which is unusual for a place carrying this much colonial fabric.

What is the climate of Olinda?

The Atlantic runs the weather. Olinda sits on an exposed stretch of the Pernambuco coast inside the tropics of the southern hemisphere, so the sea holds temperature within a narrow band and the year separates into a wetter half and a drier one instead. Shelter is never far.

A wet hour goes easily in the Pernambuco Museum of Sacred Art or the Mamulengo Museum, and the climb to Alto da Sé and the Church of Our Lady of the Mount is better taken once the stone has dried.

How do you get to Olinda?

Recife is the way in. Olinda adjoins the state capital inside the same metropolitan region, so arrivals into Pernambuco reach the other side of a municipal boundary first and finish the trip by road in a matter of minutes. Then the car turns into a liability.

The historic core runs on narrow colonial streets and hard slopes, and walking between the Convent of San Francisco, Alto da Sé and the Basilica and Monastery of St. Benedict beats driving between them.