About · Sobre · 私たちについて

Thirty years of history. Eighty hectares of living forest.

Kilombo Tenondé is a living experiment rooted in the land of Bahia, Brazil. Through Capoeira Angola, agroforestry, and decolonial philosophy, we carry ancestral knowledge forward for the generations to come.

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Our Story

A community of resistance, rooted in the land.

Located in the village of Bonfim, near Valença, in southern Bahia, this 80-hectare land was entrusted to Mestre Cobra Mansa (Cinézio Feliciano dos Santos) in the early 1990s. What he built here — at the crossroads of Capoeira Angola and agroforestry — has grown into one of the most significant living centres of Afro-Indigenous practice in the world.

A kilombo was a community of resistance built by people who escaped colonial slavery. Tenondé means "forward" in Guaraní. Together: to carry the wounds of history, and move forward with sovereignty. That is the spirit of this place.

Today, Kilombo Tenondé reaches beyond Brazil — a global network of practitioners, learners, and solidarity partners. The digital school is its latest form.

The Land

A living archive of regeneration.

Eighty hectares of native forest, farmland, and agroforest systems co-exist here. Cacao, cinnamon, clove, annatto, dendê palm, guaraná, jackfruit — biodiversity cultivated over three decades of patient practice.

This is not simply a farm. It is a living archive of what regeneration looks like in practice: how degraded land recovers, how humans work with nature rather than over it, and what ecological abundance is possible when ancestral knowledge guides the hands.

[ aerial · 80 hectares · Bahia ]

The Mestre

[ portrait · Mestre Cobra Mansa ]

Founder · Guide

Mestre Cobra Mansa

One of the most respected Mestres of Capoeira Angola in the world, Mestre Cobra Mansa has dedicated his life to teaching the art's philosophy, movement, and spiritual depth across Brazil and internationally.

His vision places Capoeira not merely as a martial art, but as a living philosophy — integrated with land regeneration and decolonial practice. Kilombo Tenondé is that vision made land.

Philosophy

Not consumption. A practice of becoming.

Learning at Kilombo Tenondé is not an act of consumption — it is a practice of becoming. We do not merely transmit information; we cultivate the capacity to act, to perceive, and to live differently.

Our curriculum centres Afro-Indigenous knowledge that has been marginalised by Western modernity. It is both a recovery of what has been lost and a response to contemporary crises: ecological collapse, individualism, and the erosion of meaning.

Body, land, and spirit are not separate domains. They are one practice.

Thirty years of history. Eighty hectares of living forest.

A community of resistance, rooted in the land.

A living archive of regeneration.

Mestre Cobra Mansa

Not consumption. A practice of becoming.

Carry the practice forward with us.