This study focuses on the complex and changeable legal status of the lands granted in 1552 to D. António de Ataíde, first earl of Castanheira, in the royal captaincy of Bahia, Brazil. Having been granted as sesmarias, these lands and their territory were converted into a private and hereditary captaincy in 1556, being also bonded to an entailed estate already existing in Portugal since the 1520s. Thus, while the whole set of assets, rents, rights and exemptions vis-à-vis the crown and overseas entities was being redefined, the statutes, obligations and privileges of Castanheira’s family patrimony were changing as well. The specificities of this process, when observed within the larger process of modern state-building in Portugal at the height of the overseas expansion, offer the possibility of deepening the discussion on the dualisms that accommodated and structured the Portuguese political system on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
