The maroon state of Palmares endured for ninety years

Evidence

In the Pernambuco region, the greatest settlement of all, the extraordinary state of Palmares would endure from 1605 to 1695. Palmares was a plural, designating the several settlements (palmars) that made up a community, which, though necessarily agrarian, was even more preoccupied with its defense. Diggs gives us this description: The site of the quilombo of Os Palmares was a mountainous region, steep and precipitous-a natural defense of the inhabitants-but at the same time a virgin land whose exuberance was considered the best in the state of Pernambuco. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 662