Helvécia, a mainly Afro-Brazilian community in the south of Bahia, traces its origins to a coffee plantation founded in 1818 by Swiss and German settlers. The wealth of those estates rested on the forced labour of enslaved people of African descent: in the middle of the nineteenth century, for every two hundred white settlers there were some two thousand enslaved. Working with the inhabitants, Dom Smaz photographs what remains of that history in the present life of the village.