Stuart Schwartz places the number at roughly 11,000, noting that it was, regardless, 'undoubtedly the largest fugitive community to have existed in Brazil'. One estimate places the population of Palmares in the 1690s at around 20,000 inhabitants, although recent scholarship has questioned whether this figure is exaggerated. Palmares was home to not only escaped enslaved Africans, but also to Indigenous peoples, caboclos, and poor or marginalized Portuguese settlers, especially Portuguese soldiers trying to escape forced military service. No contemporary document called Palmares a quilombo instead the term mocambo was used. The quilombos came into existence when Africans began arriving in Brazil in the mid-1530s and grew significantly as slavery expanded. Quilombos were settlements mainly of survivors and free-born enslaved African people. The modern tradition has been to call the community the Quilombo of Palmares.

The quilombo was located in what is now the municipality of União dos Palmares. It was located in the captaincy of Pernambuco, in what is today the Brazilian state of Alagoas. Palmares, or Quilombo dos Palmares, was a quilombo, a community of escaped slaves and others, in colonial Brazil that developed from 1605 until its suppression in 1694.

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