he term Canhembora (corruption of quilombola, a runaway slave hiding in a quilombo) is the name of an stream in the Castro municipality. In old documents, variants are found: calhambola and conhembora. In Itaiacoca (Ponta Grossa), there was a place called Quilombo. It is also the name of a stream in Sengés, and there is a fazenda in Tibagi called Mocambo, a synonym of quilombo, a hiding place for runaway slaves. The economic structure of the Campos Gerais fazendas relied heavily on the African slave population. Today, the existence of predominantly Black rural communities in the region suggests that, many years ago, groups of slaves fleeing their masters organized into quilombos. Runaway slaves were considered to be criminals and were pursued implacably by “forest captains” (capitães do mato), who were commissioned and charged with finding and capturing runaways at any cost. According to the researcher Oney Borba, in 1741, one Alvará Régio determined that when “calambolas”were found“ let them be branded on the shoulder with the letter F [for fugídio, runaway]”, and that, if the mark is found on a runaway, “cut off an ear, without any trial at all, soon as the quilombo is taken, and before imprisonment”. These measures had been taken after slaves fled Fazenda Cambiju after killing the supervisor, in 1738. The slaves were said to be hiding among the rock formations at Vila Velha. In 1777, when Francisco Carneiro Lobo was commissioned as a forest captain to capture some runaway slaves, he was briefed by the Captain General: “if they resist, they may be freely shot in the legs, in order to be secured more easily; in any event, they must be captured”.

     The tension between masters and slaves often led to assassination. Some slaves in the region were condemned to death by hanging, according to the laws of the time, for having killed the owner or foreman of the fazenda. The Imperial Law of 1835 decreed that slaves be condemned to death after seriously wounding the master, his wife, any other member of his family, the manager, the supervisor and the women who lived with them. In the case of a light wound, the punishment was the lash, and was proportional to circumstances more or less aggravating.

     When they fled, slaves sought out hard to reach places, like the hiding places in the Ribeira sertão or Serra do Apon, in Castro. Descendents of runaway slaves still live in those regions. In other places now considered to be old quilombos, the descendants remain because they had obtained the land through planned giving (doação em testamento), as was the case in the Sutil and Santa Cruz communities in Ponta Grossa. The change in the meaning of the word quilombo is due to the legal ownership of the lands granted to the descendents of slaves, who were gradually being stripped of the land their ancestors were given before Abolition.

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