The Neighborhoods of Salvador da Bahia

There are two neighborhoods in Salvador that just about every visitor gets to know. One is Pelourinho (Pillory), which has its own "chapter" in the "Table of Contents", and the other is Barra (Bar, as in reef, and pronounced "BA-ha"), which has a number of hotels and the two beaches closest to the city center (with the exception of some very small beaches frequented only by very local people).

There is, of course, a lot more to Salvador than this, including:

• Vinicius de Moraes

  Itapoan -- mentioned in the "Beaches" section. An interesting seaside village (with several alternative spellings). You can get great acarajés from Cira (the Baiana's name), across from a praça that's very lively at night. The Baiana next to Cira is not as famous, but her acarajés are great too. Itapoan runs the gamut from poor to rich, has a good beach, great barracas, and a great feira (open-air market). It also has a lot of music and dancing on the weekends, both along the seafront and at the Lagoa (lagoon) de Abaeté, a few blocks away.
  
  Itapoan is where Dona Flor (from the Jorge Amado novel Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands) gave up her virginity to the scoundrel who was to become her first husband.  It was also home to poet/playwright/lyricist Vinícius de Moraes for a number of years, and composer Dorival Caymmi.  Vinícius, together with his collaborator Toquinho, wrote and performed an evocative hymn to the bucolic village of the time...

Listen to "Tarde em Itapoã"

• Liberdade (Liberty) -- low-middle class to poor. It's kind of the Harlem of Salvador in that it is a huge, bustling neighborhood with a rich cultural background. A lot of capoeira came out of this area, and Liberdade is home to the African blocos Ilê Aiyê and Muzenza. I lived there for a year.
  
  Speaking of Ilê Aiyê, the group's provenance is a specific area of Liberdade called "Curuzu" (their headquarters being situated on the Ladeira do Curuzu)...and given this it is fitting that Curuzu came into existence as a quilombo. The neighborhood where Timbalada came into existence also started as a quilombo (I'm speaking of Candeal, an area of Brotas), as did the neighborhoods of Calabar (a part of Federação) and Alto da Sereia (in Rio Vermelho).

• Boca do Rio (Mouth of the River) -- on the Atlantic side, is not quite as far out as Itapoan. It is home to capoeira mestres Nô, Lázaro, and Jelon Vieira, and is for the most part lower-middle class to poor. I like Boca do Rio.

• Engenho Velho de Federação (Old Mill of Federation) -- is a mostly poor neighborhood set on the territory of what was a sugarcane plantation (hence the engenho, or mill, which served to process the cane).  What this neighborhood lacks in material prosperity it more than makes up for in culture, Engenho Velho de Federação being home to 23 houses of Candomblé (including Bogum [Zoogodô Bogum Malê Rundó] and Casa Branca [Ilê Axé Yá Nassô] ).

• Cabula -- is a neighborhood named for a quilombo which was finally destroyed in 1807, the quilombo's name deriving from a rhythm (example below) used in candomblé angola (brought and elaborated by the the Bantus, first group of slaves to arrive in Bahia).  This area -- the character of which ranges from poor to middle-class, numerous concrete apartment buildings and houses having been constructed in the 1970s -- is home to terreiros de candomblé Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá and Bate-Folha.

Listen to Cabula... and, if you'll listen closely enough to cabula...

...you'll hear the precursor to chula, and hence to samba.

• Dois de Julho (2nd of July) -- is the area around Largo (Place) Dois de Julho, close to the city center.  This is where Dona Flor's first husband Vadinho died dancing samba during Carnival, and one of the streets in this area -- Rua do Sodré ("Sodré" is a Portugese surname) -- is where Dona Flor lived with both her first and second husbands and where she had her cooking school. The junction of Rua Carlos Gomes and Rua do Cabeça (which is one of the access streets to Dois de Julho; "Rua do Cabeça" is "Street of the Head, or Head Street", which in this sense -- given the masculine "do" rather than the feminine "da" -- denotes the head of something as opposed to a head unattached) was the fictional location of Dona Flor's second husband's pharmacy.  That pharmacy -- like so much local color in Jorge Amado's fiction -- was based on an actually existing pharmacy (Amado locating his fictional establishment upon the site of the real one -- Pharmácia Luz -- which is there on the corner to this day).
  
  During the time in which Amado's novel was set (early 1940's I believe) the area was, as described by Amado himself in the novel, lower middle-class, and for the most  part it continues to be so today.  At the top of Rua do Sodré -- which leads from Dois de Julho down to the Museu de Arte Sacre (Musem of Sacred Art) -- are several small and very typically Bahian bars, one of which serves batidas and where my friends and I like to sit and observe the local life.  As sunset approaches this area becomes very questionable.

• Preguiça (Laziness) -- The far end of Rua do Sodré (from Dois de Julho) runs into the Ladeira da Preguiça (a "ladeira" is a sloping street), which in turn winds its way down to the lower city.  The ladeira (the descending or ascending of which would nowadays invite robbery of anybody obviously a tourist) was in Salvador's early years the principal thoroughfare for the transportation of arriving cargo from the lower city to the upper.  Slaves did much of this work (their compatriots in this being burros and donkeys) and in return for their backbreaking labor they were made to constantly endure cries and accusations of laziness.  "Ladeira da Preguiça" is the title of a Gilberto Gil song written in 1971.

• Saude (Health) -- is an old, interesting, somewhat crumbling neighborhood in the style of Pelourinho but with no commercialization for the tourist trade.  From Pelourinho it lies just across from the Baixa dos Sapateiros (Cobbler's Low Area, so called because it traces the divide between the hills of Pelourinho and Saude and because of a common trade once practiced there).  Nowadays the Baixa dos Sapateiros is given over to cheap shops with hawkers calling out to potential customers as they pass on the sidewalk, but in the 1930's the area -- or presumably a lovely young thing in the area -- inspired the great Ary Barroso to write what has become Bahia's most enduring "theme song", Na Baixa do Sapateiro ("In the Baixa do Sapateiro"; for some reason the song title is in the singular).

Listen to "Na Baixa do Sapateiro"


Moving back in time, before the Baixa dos Sapateiras was a street it was a stream called Rio das Tripas (Tripe River)...where the unwanted refuge of Salvador's slaughterhouse district (Barroquinha) was tossed (Barroquinha's slaughterhouses are long gone, the area since having become a city bus terminal).

Barroquinha was named for a church (Nossa Senhora da Barroquinha) behind which, incidentally, the precursor to Salvador's oldest continually existing house of candomblé was founded (Casa Branca). The church was also the seat of the Confraria de Nossa Senhora da Boa Morte (Sisterhood of Our Lady of the Good Death), a group which subsequently departed for the town of Cachoeira (where their festa is held yearly, in August).

• Pituba/Itaigara -- are two neighborhoods which in fact merge to form one, and doing likewise with Caminho das Árvores (Trail of the Trees) they form a triumverate of middle and upper-middle class Salvador, home to doctors, engineers, and lawyers. These areas are usually not interesting to visitors seeking local flavor, though even here one may see rodas de capoeira in open areas in the evenings. I lived in this area for a year.

• Barris (Barrels) -- ...Hey! That's where I live now! I like it because it's right smack in the center of the city and close to a lot of good stuff. Plus it's quiet, in spite of being a three-minute walk to Carnaval. Around the corner, on Saturdays, when the high school gets out, there's usually samba da roda (making that high school doubly different from mine in Indianapolis -- we didn't have classes on Saturday and we sure as hell didn't have any samba de roda!).
  
  The name comes from the fact that people would fetch water (or send to have it fetched) -- in barrels -- from a freshwater spring located in a valley between what is now Barris and what is now the neighborhood of Tororó (that valley is now the Lapa city bus terminal).

• Santo Antônio (Saint Anthony) -- is pretty much of an extension of Pelourinho, though much more given to residencial living. Santo Antônio is part of Salvador's Centro Histórico and and most of the houses date from the colonial era. At the far end from Pelourinho is the Largo (square) de Santo Antônio, banked by a church (Santo Antônio of course) and a fort (well just guess; oh alright, the Forte de Santo Antônio), the fort being home to a lot of capoeira angola. A very cool area.

Igreja Da Terçeira Ordem do Carmo, in Santo Antônio

• Pituba/Itaigara -- are two neighborhoods which in fact merge to form one, and doing likewise with Caminho das Árvores (Trail of the Trees) they form a triumverate of middle and upper-middle class Salvador, home to doctors, engineers, and lawyers. These areas are usually not interesting to visitors seeking local flavor, though even here one may see rodas de capoeira in open areas in the evenings. I lived in this area for a year.

• Rio Vermelho (Red River) -- is where the great Festa da Yemenjá (goddess of the sea) takes place on February 2nd. It was home to the writer Jorge Amado and is currently home to singer Gal Costa (who bought her house overlooking the Praia da Paciéncia -- Patience Beach -- from musical colleague Caetano Veloso). Gilberto Gil has a home in the area too. Lots of bars and restaurants. My bairro (neigborhood) for a year.
  
  The name comes from a "river" giving onto the Atlantic Ocean (I use quotes because what was at one time a small river has become a concretized gutter), the name of this river being "Camurujipe", a Portuguese twisting of the original Tupí "Camarajibe" -- or "River of the Camarás".  Given that a camará is a small red flower which in earlier times grew in abundance here in Salvador, a more accurate rendering would be "Rio das Flores Vermelhas" ("River of the Red Flowers"), but that's quite a mouthful of syllables.

• Ondina -- Carnival ends here (see the "Carnival" section), several kilometers up from Barra. Ondina has a nice urban beach and some of the big, standard-style hotels (Othon Palace, etc.). Up on a bluff overlooking Ondina proper is the Alta da Ondina (Ondina Heights) with a lovely, windswept, and almost lonely-feeling view of the Atlantic and city below. There's a restaurant up there taking advantage of that view, the eponymous Alta da Ondina. I haven't eaten there, so although I can recommend the vista, I'm not in a position right now to say anything about the establishment itself (other than it looks good). A large part of the Federal University of Bahia campus is in Ondina, as well as the city zoo.

• Subúrbio (Suburbia) -- is, as the name implies, not a single neighborhood, but comprises rather the neighborhoods on the city's perimeter. And, in great contrast to Europe or the U.S., this is not where the working middle-class flees to; it is where the vast majority of the city's poor people live. Some of the neighborhoods encountered as one follows Avenida Suburbana along the inside of the bay are Alagados (literally "Flooded"; these are the houses on stilts that one sometimes sees in photographs or paintings), Plataforma, Ilha Amarela ("Yellow Island", which isn't an island at all but was christened during an epidemic of yellow fever, when the area was quarantined), Periperi, and Paripe.

  Most of this area looks like the Garden of Eden after having been scattered by God with clay-red dice. The dice are where people live, their dwellings (the humbler ones are called "barracos") built up a little bit at a time (finances permitting) using the clay block ubiquitous to Brazil. It is very rare that the outside of the block is finished, people preferring to devote their limited resources to the inside. The main streets are usually (badly) paved, but most of the others are dirt paths populated by children, dogs, and roosters. The immediate impression is usually not of grinding poverty, but this is almost a trick of the light. People make do and get by, barely; conversation, radio, TV, dominoes, family, the occasional beer and get-together making up the day-to-day activities. Public education in these areas is a national disgrace, the government pleading poverty while earning salaries, benefits, and retirement packages worthy of King Midas (in addition to the perks of rampant and endemic corruption).

  Periperi is home to and seat of bloco afro/musical-social organization Ara Ketu.

• Campo Grande (Big Field) -- is not strictly a neighborhood, but the name of what is essentially the Central Park of Salvador is used for the surrounding area. The park is the beginning and end point for the Campo Grande - Praça Castro Alves Carnival circuit. (one of two, the other being Barra - Ondina). At Carnival time Campo Grande is full of barracas, Port-A-Potties, and, up in the reviewing stands, government bigwigs anxious to demonstrate that they are a part of the povão ("people", with overtones of riffraff) too.

• Cosme de Farias -- was originally called Quinta das Beatas due to the fact that a large part of the land on which the neighborhood was founded belonged at one time to a nunnery ("quinta" is an expanse of land, and "beatas" is akin to "religious", per "beatified").  Sometime during the 1960s a man small in stature and great of heart moved from the Rua da Independência -- close to the Baixo dos Sapateiros -- to Quinta das Beatas, and this neighborhood eventually came to bear his name.   The name was something unneeded by writer Jorge Amado...he took rather the life and personality of his friend and upon these built the character Damião de Souza in his novel Tenda dos Milagres (Tent of Miracles)...a thin disguise in that the twin saints Cosme & Damião are an important part of life in Bahia.  Sr. de Farias' funeral procession in 1972 -- from Pelourinho to the cemetery at Quintas do Lázaros -- was the largest to ever have taken place in Bahia.
  
  More to come on the fascinating life of Cosme de Farias...

• Alagados (Flooded) -- * Note: This is taken from the "Volunteer Work" page. -- Alagados means "flooded", and refers to shacks built over water on stilts, a scene frequently and picturesquely displayed in a lot of guide books. These "houses" are not picturesque at all; they are horrid and dangerous both in terms of human violence and health and sanitation conditions. "Jardim Cruzeiro" means "Garden Cross", and this is an area built over garbage landfill set just in from Alagados, over what used to comprise Alagados itself. Jardim Cruzeiro now looks like any other poor neighborhood in Salvador, and for longtime residents that is a big step up.

Salvador | Bahia | Brazil

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