“We are warriors,” Manuela proudly says, representing the fourth generation of her family selling aratu moquequinha on the sands of the paradise-like Mangue Seco. Railda, her grandmother, learned the recipe from her mother, Manuela’s great-grandmother, who had been making it for several decades to sell at the market. “You have to be courageous, it’s very tiring,” she says. The local tourism boom starting in 1989 when the soap opera Tieta, which was filmed there, aired improved the family’s sales but also increased the work of “fishing” the small crabs in the mangrove along the banks of the Rio Real. While it used to be possible to find the creatures near the beach, now it’s necessary to go further by boat to find them. “I enjoy it, that’s why I haven’t stopped,” says Railda, who likes to sing while catching the aratus. At home, after pounding and extracting the meat from the creatures throughout the whole day – only 100 of them yield 1 kilogram of meat – they prepare the moquequinha with spices and coconut milk, wrap it in palm leaves, and go into the fight, now looking for tourists on the sand. “In the restaurants here, aratu moqueca is a very expensive dish,” says Railda.