The first settlements appeared after the year 1534, when King Dom João III of Portugal divided Brazil into 15 Hereditary Captaincies and handed them over under a hereditary regime to nobles, soldiers and navigators linked to the Court.
The objective was to facilitate the administration and speed up the colonization of the newly occupied lands.
It is considered that the formal foundation of Caraguatatuba was in the 17th century, through the Sesmarias concession, a legal institute created by the Portuguese Empire for the distribution of land to individuals for food production.
At the beginning of 1600, the lands were donated to Miguel Gonçalves Borba and Domingos Jorge, which was when the city began to be born between 1664 and 1665.
Among the first buildings is the small church of Santo Antônio, patron saint of the city of Caraguatatuba.
The settlement was elevated to the category of Vila de Santo Antônio de Caraguatatuba in 1770, at the request of Don Luiz Antônio de Souza Botelho Morgado de Mateus, then captain general of the Captaincy of São Paulo.
In the year 1847, the president of the Province of São Paulo ordered that the town be renamed the Parish.
Caraguatatuba received its political and administrative emancipation in the year 1857.
In March 1967, the city suffered one of the biggest catastrophes in the state of São Paulo, when uninterrupted rains caused landslides and mudslides in almost all parts of the city. The balance of the tragedy was the death of 436 people and the destruction of a large number of houses and buildings.
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