Domini is running towards me in his swimming shorts, scattering words of broken English, his hands crisscrossing the air. ‘You must have lunch,’ he says, motioning me to a lopsided bench hooded with palm trees. His wife Françoise, dressed in a casual Day-Glo sarong, tries to rub suncream on his nose as he goes.

The pair have reason to be excited – they’ve bought a chunk of paradise, turned it into a petit France and built a boutique hotel on it. Four hours by car and boat from Salvador in northeastern Brazil, their bit of beach on the island of Boipeba is utterly deserted, the kind of place where you are scared to mar snow-white virgin sand with footprints. The sea ebbs and flows cheerfully on their doorstep like a set of bobbing, white-maned carousel ponies. Coconut palms swoop in from the forests beyond. And you could actually hear the brooding, beautiful silence… if Domini would just be quiet for a moment.

But the French and Italians slowly colonising this state at the top of Brazil like to shout about it – and Europe’s in-crowd has been listening. Bahia is about to have a fashion moment: London’s chicest hotelier, Anouska Hempel, is opening a five-star here this year, and the capital, Salvador, just acquired its first design hotel. Get there now, however, and you won’t have to worry about the label in your swimsuit. It’s currently so undeveloped, I found myself navigating the coast on my own – with a compass (‘You’ll need it,’ said the man who’d rented me my car. ‘They don’t do road signs in paradise’).

Though Domini is a middle-aged man from Biarritz with a career in advertising behind him, his hotel, Alizée Morere, is bound to be a gold star on the fashion map. It looks like something from Hip Hotels – a collection of glass bungalows gazing out towards the sea but hidden from each other among swathes of rainforest. Two kilometres away, along barely trodden jungle paths, the Pousada Mangabeiras is the only other interruption on the landscape: balanced on a cliff, with a few chic bungalows accessorised simply with views of the beach below. And the only way to access either is to walk along the sand from the sole cafe – seeing nobody, obviously.

Boipeba is so unspoilt that it’s been wired to electricity for just a decade and, at times, it feels as if nobody’s visited since the Tupi Indians left, 600 years ago. But then, between kilometre-stretches of unblemished sand, you stumble across people like Domini and Françoise, setting up home and hotel.

Over a meal of juicy steak barbecued right on the beach, I overhear Domini evangelising to one of his guests: ‘There are no cars here, and most of the boats are just for fishing lobster, crab and clams. You can feel the ghosts of the Indians in the patches of dense rainforest. And you should see the villagers,’ he squeals, with scant regard for political correctness, and flashing shots of unsuspecting residents on his digital camera. ‘They’re straight out of Gauguin!’

Salvador, where I’d started my trip, was equally photogenic: a sugary dollop of faded, wedding-cake buildings, iced in strawberry and lemon, and edged in bright advertisements for politicians. Once the slave capital of Brazil, the city earned its reputation and wealth with sugar, shipping in West Africans to work the plantations, building another colonial confection with each small fortune. When they were finally freed, those slaves stamped their culture on the city with rhythmic axé music, the balletic martial art Capoeira, and their own lilting accent on the Portuguese language.

Despite the proximity of paradise (Boipeba is only hours away),

I spent a couple of days in Salvador – browsing relics and rosaries in dusty junk shops, and visiting some of the city’s 365 churches. But, from my terrace at the Pousada do Pilar in the old town, the ocean beckoned. In sleeping hours, when the heat rose and my room glowed with the dawn, I fought jet lag by watching a somnambulistic sun crawl from the sea. Ships ferried freight out of the city, sending rippling waves to the shore, and either side of me a hundred neighbours were gazing at the water in silence, too.

The sea, you see, is where the Brazilian soul wants to be. Or perhaps it’s simpler than that, and they just like a nice beach. Either way, once morning hits, Salvador seems to move en masse to Barra – an urban beach 10 minutes from the centre. This sunny stretch has always exerted a siren-like pull – it’s the first place the Europeans settled in Bahia, and Gilberto Gil used to hang out here in the ’60s, when he fancied a break from ‘The Girl from Ipanema’, his annoyingly ubiquitous worldwide hit. Enterprising teens serve fruit juice and fiery cachaça spirit as you bronze. Then, when the sun gets too hot, you can retreat to a beachside cafe for churrascaria – slabs of cooked meat served on skewers. By early afternoon the whole city seems to be there.

Which helps explain why inveterate sunworshippers are already looking beyond, and moving on, to more deserted beaches further south. ‘Morro is where you should go,’ says the young guy who rattles me up a Caipirinha from his makeshift beach bar. ‘It’s a long journey, but I promise you won’t have seen anything like it.’

He’s referring to Morro de São Paulo, capital of the island of Tinharé. Getting there means a four-hour drive from Salvador along jungle-edged highway, then a choppy dinghy voyage. As I wedged myself between a high-spirited group of middle-agers and a young couple cooing over a baby, the exhilaration was apparent – drinkers getting more boisterous with each cracked-open beer, the jokes and laughter growing dirtier on the blustery night air.

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