What was the War of Canudos?

A town called Belo Monte

In June 1893, Antônio Conselheiro, a lay holy man who had walked the sertão (the dry backlands of northeastern Brazil) for more than twenty years, settled at a nearly abandoned ranch in a bend of the Vaza-Barris River, in the state of Bahia. The ranch was called Canudos. He renamed it Belo Monte, “Beautiful Hill.” Within months whole families arrived, carrying oratories, chests and statues of saints.

By 1897 the mud town had 5,200 houses, one of the largest settlements in Bahia. Its people were cowhands, sharecroppers, pious women, people freed from slavery in 1888 and Indigenous Kiriri, Kaimbé and Tuxá families. They prayed at sunrise and dusk, farmed by the river and kept a school. Outsiders kept the old ranch name, so history remembers it as Canudos. Why the government marched on it is the subject of What caused the War of Canudos?.

Four expeditions in less than a year

Each defeat brought a bigger army:

1. November 1896, Uauá. Just over a hundred soldiers under Lieutenant Pires Ferreira meet an armed procession and fall back.
2. January 1897, the Cambaio hills. Almost 600 men under Major Febrônio de Brito, with two Krupp cannon, are stopped among the rocks.
3. March 1897. Colonel Antônio Moreira César attacks with almost 1,300 men, gets lost in the maze of lanes and is mortally wounded. The retreat becomes a rout.
4. June to October 1897. General Artur Oscar leads the fourth expedition, which grows with reinforcements from all over Brazil to some 10,000 soldiers and 21 cannon.

Siege and fall

The fourth expedition reached the Favela hill, facing the town, on June 27, 1897, and was pinned there for weeks, hungry and under fire. Only after the Minister of War, Marshal Carlos Machado Bittencourt, came to Bahia in August to organize supply trains did the ring close. The artillery brought down the bell of the old church and the towers of the new one. Antônio Conselheiro died inside the town on September 22, and his people kept fighting.

On October 2, hundreds of women, children and old people surrendered under a promise that their lives would be spared. The promise was broken. At dusk on October 5, the last defenders fell in a trench beside the new church. Euclides da Cunha, who covered the war as a reporter, wrote near the end of his book:

Let us close this book. Canudos did not surrender. Unique in all history, it held out to utter exhaustion.

Who won

The army won: it took the town and leveled it, counting 5,200 houses as it went. But victory took four expeditions and cost the lives of two colonels, and estimates of Belo Monte’s dead run from 10,000 to 20,000 (see How many people died in the War of Canudos?). Five years later Euclides, who had arrived calling Canudos a monarchist uprising, published a classic of Brazilian literature that called the campaign a crime.

Is The War of the End of the World a true story?

It is built on this one. Mario Vargas Llosa’s 1981 novel The War of the End of the World follows the real events, from the Conselheiro’s wanderings to the fall of Belo Monte, and mixes real people such as Moreira César with invented ones. The town itself is gone. Survivors rebuilt a village on the ruins, and in the late 1960s the Cocorobó reservoir flooded old Canudos. In dry years the ruins rise above the water again. Since 1986, the Canudos State Park has protected the battlefield.