A quilombo (Portuguese pronunciation: [kiˈlõbu] ^ⓘ; from the Kimbundu word kilombo, lit. 'war camp') is a Brazilian hinterland settlement founded by people of African origin, and others sometimes called Carabali. Most of the inhabitants of quilombos, called quilombolas, were maroons, a term for escaped slaves.

Documentation about refugee slave communities typically uses the term mocambo for settlements, which is an Ambundu word meaning "war camp". A mocambo is typically much smaller than a quilombo. Quilombo was not used until the 1670s, primarily in the more southerly parts of Brazil.

In the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America, such villages or camps were called palenques. Its inhabitants are palenqueros. They spoke various Spanish-African-based creole languages such as Palenquero.

Quilombos are classified as one of the three basic forms of active resistance by enslaved Africans. They also regularly attempted to seize power and conducted armed insurrections at plantations to gain amelioration of conditions. Typically, quilombos were a "pre–19th century phenomenon". In the first half of the 19th century in Brazil, enslaved people typically took armed action as part of their resistance. The colony was undergoing both political transition, as it fought for independence from Portugal, and new tensions associated with an increased slave trade, which brought in many more native-born Africans who resisted slavery.

In 17th-century Angola, a new military formation called kilombo (a fortified town surrounded by a wooden palisade) appeared among Imbangala warriors, which would soon be used in Brazil by freed Angolan slaves.

It is widely believed that the term quilombo establishes a link between settlements and the culture of West Central Africa from where the majority of slaves were forcibly brought to Brazil. During the era of slave trafficking, natives in present-day central Angola, called Imbangala, had created an institution called a kilombo that united various tribes of diverse lineage into a community designed for military resistance.^{[citation needed]}

In South American Spanish of the Southern Cone, the word quilombo has come to mean brothel; in Argentina, Bolivia, Honduras, Paraguay, and Uruguay, a mess, noise or disorder; in Venezuela, a remote or out-of-the-way place.

Legal slavery was present in Brazil for approximately three centuries, with the earliest known landing of enslaved Africans taking place 52 years after the Portuguese were the first Europeans to set foot in Brazil in 1500. The demand for enslaved Africans continued to increase through the 18th century, even as the Brazilian sugar economy ceased to dominate the world economy. In its place, commodity crops such as tobacco increased in prominence.