The Online Guide to Salvador da Bahia, Brazil: Getting Started

Before there was Brazil... there was Bahia...

There are certain countries, the names of which fire the popular imagination. Brazil is one of them; an amalgam of primitive and sophisticated, jungle and elegance, beating drums and luscious jazz harmonics -- there's no other place like it in the world.

Before the Berimbau

And while Rio, or its fame anyway, tends toward the elegant and sophisticated end of the spectrum, Bahia tends toward the other. Bahia is the land of the drum, of capoeira and candomblé.

Bahia's capital of Salvador (the name of the city was "Bahia" until it was changed by officious meddlers at the beginning of the twentieth century*) sits on a spit of land sticking south south-west into the Atlantic Ocean. And although it sits well within the tropics at a southern latitude of thirteen degrees, it receives a refreshing sea-breeze which seldom falters until the wee hours of the morning when things have generally cooled off anyway. The city sits on a huge bay, a Baia de Todos os Santos (the Bay of All Saints), and the topography is predominently hill and valley.

* See an interesting article from the New York Times dated July 14, 1874, in which "our own correspondent" (the Times', that is) refers to the "town" as "Bahia"...

It's for this reason that people speak of a cidade alta (upper city) and cidade baixa (lower city). Both are connected on the bay side by the famous Elevador Lacerda, a "marvel" hailed mightily in most guide books. Forget the marvel (you'll see what I mean when you're on it), but the elevator does beat walking up down the steeply inclining streets which serve the same function of connection. There is a fifteen centavo charge for the ride. That's less than nine cents as I write, so who's complaining. There's also the nearby Plano Inclinado, same price.

Elevador Lacerda

(Since writing the above the elevator building has been refurbished and it's actually quite nice now -- lots of polished Brazilian granite. It's also air-conditioned, something of a blessing during peak periods. The best part of all however is still what was always there: the magnificent view from the upper level.)

From the Cidade Baixa (Lower City)

And it's this rugged geography which is so disorienting to people new to the city. Neighborhoods (bairros) tend to be built on the heights, with thoroughfares twisting around and between. Streets zigzag and change names, and a lot of them are one-way, necessitating roundabout ways of arriving at any given destination. It can take a long time to catch on, but by the same token it can add even more of an element of mystery to the place.

One of the principal characteristics of the city is the outgoingness of the people. People talk to strangers here, are friendly to them. People are not divided by that initial suspicion of strangers that marks so many other places, at least as far as where sociability is concerned. It's easy to meet people.

But there's another characteristic which often takes first-time visitors to Salvador by surprise: I'm referring to the city's urbanscape, its architecture, building and home styles. Colonial Pelourinho was built while Bahia was the economic powerhouse of South America, and many of the buildings are splendid. Most of the rest of Salvador was built on a shoestring, and the results range from the unpainted claybrick shacks of the poor to the reinforced concrete buildings one sees everywhere (usually in need of a painting), to the more expensive modern and generally undistinguished apartment towers found in the middle and upper-middle class neighborhoods. People expecting leafy tropical bungalows may be disappointed. This is an urban, third-world city, with plenty of crowds and traffic jams. It does, however, retain its renowned Bahian soul, and tropical serenity (along with those leafy tropical bungalows) is very close at hand.

Casa do Comércio

Schubert's Ave Maria is traditional in Salvador at 6 p.m. Here is a streaming excerpt of a lovely, unusual, and uniquely Brazilian version of it played in Cantinho da Mara ("Mara's Little Corner") in one of Salvador's older neighborhoods on Saturday evening, September 11th, 2004.

Lastly, perhaps the quality most fundamental, most elemental to Salvador and Bahia, most striking in the sense of setting this place apart and making it its own -- is its zeitgeist. Bahia's timeframe runs independently of the (developed) world's decade-defined stages of development. Music here, for example, isn't 70s, 80s, or 90s. It is, rather, measured in its distance from -- or more precisely by its proximity to -- the senzalas (slave compounds) of centuries past, to the quilombos (communities formed by runaway slaves) of both past and present. Likewise for Bahia's lovely and deadly Afro-Brazilian martial art of capoeira, continuing to grow and develop without abandoning the ethos of struggle that spurred its creation in the first place. Oxalá, Oxóssi, Xangô -- Yemanjá and Iansã -- all virtually forgotten on their native ground across the Atlantic -- are known to everybody here, determining to a large degree the makeup and timing of Salvador's yearly social calendar. The zeitgiest of Bahia is that its time is its own, a time in many ways above and independent of the carryings on of the rest of the world.

Moreover these manifestations of popular culture are current, now, modern. They hearken back to the past but aren't stuck in it. They are not continually re-enacted museum pieces but rather a part of a continuing flowering and evolution. Put simply, they are a part of life here.

The Old City

Excellent maps to Salvador (guiaPRATICUS Mapa Turística de Salvador) can be bought at Bahiatursa in Pelourinho (the address is Rua das Laranjeiras, 12; any policeman or shopkeeper can point you in the right direction) for R$3.00. The maps are accompanied by a useful pamphlet/guide. The Praticus maps are also available online, at www.praticus.com, though the hard copies are a lot easier to understand and use.

And in that Bahia is a land of festivals (festas), quite often religious in origin though often quite secular in accompaniment, I'm including here (Festas in Bahia) a page with festival dates, descriptions, and other scraps of pertinent information.