The City That Keeps Time

On a Tuesday evening in Pelourinho, a drum line assembles at the top of the Largo do Pelourinho with no announcement and no stage. Twenty surdos, a rank of repiques, a caixa section; the first pattern lands, the cobbles fill, and within four minutes several hundred people are moving in a square that was, for the better part of three centuries, the place where enslaved people were publicly whipped. The name of the district means whipping post. Nobody who lives here has ever needed that explained.

Salvador is the oldest colonial capital of Brazil, the largest Black city outside the African continent by most reckonings, and the place where the country’s central historical fact — that roughly four to five million enslaved Africans were landed in Brazil, more than in any other destination in the Atlantic trade — is least possible to look away from. It is also, and not coincidentally, the most rhythmically alive city in the Americas.

An upper city and a lower one

The geography explains the history. Salvador sits on a bluff above the Bay of All Saints, and the city divided itself vertically: the Cidade Alta on the escarpment for churches, government and the merchant class, the Cidade Baixa at sea level for the port, the warehouses and the work. The Elevador Lacerda, an art deco lift built to connect them, still runs and still costs almost nothing, which makes it the best-value viewpoint in Brazil.

The upper city holds the historic centre, a UNESCO-listed grid of 17th and 18th-century townhouses painted in colours that would be gaudy anywhere with less light. At its centre is the church of São Francisco, whose interior is so comprehensively gilded — an estimated several hundred kilograms of gold leaf over carved cedar — that first-time visitors tend to laugh out loud. The wealth came from sugar, and the sugar came from the plantations of the Recôncavo, and the plantations ran on people.

The lower city has the Mercado Modelo, the ferry terminal for the island of Itaparica, and the Igreja do Bonfim on its own hill to the north — the church whose railings are tied with hundreds of thousands of coloured ribbons, the fitinhas, each one knotted three times for three wishes. That the Bonfim is simultaneously a Catholic basilica and the ritual home of Oxalá, the senior orixá of the Candomblé pantheon, is not a contradiction anyone here feels obliged to resolve.

The religion that had to hide

Candomblé arrived with the people who were shipped across, principally from Yoruba, Fon and Bantu-speaking regions, and survived by camouflage. Prohibited outright, its orixás were mapped onto Catholic saints — Oxalá to Nosso Senhor do Bonfim, Iemanjá to Our Lady, Xangô to Saint Jerome — and its ceremonies held behind doors that Catholic altars faced.

Repression persisted well into the twentieth century; terreiros required police permits to hold ceremonies until the mid-1970s, and raids were routine. Legal recognition and the slow shift from criminalised practice to acknowledged national heritage came late, and Bahia has since listed and protected several of the oldest terreiros as cultural patrimony.

The city put its gods in the saints’ clothes and waited three hundred years. Then it took the coats off in public.

The visitor question is where the line sits. Ceremonies are religious services, not performances; some terreiros welcome respectful outsiders on specific festival days, most do not advertise, and photography is generally not permitted. The honest way in is through the public festivals — the February procession for Iemanjá at Rio Vermelho, when the beach fills with people carrying flowers and small boats out into the sea, or the washing of the Bonfim steps in January, when the baianas in white lead a procession of enormous size up the hill.

Capoeira, and what it was for

The other export is capoeira, which is either a martial art disguised as a dance or a dance that retained its use, depending on which mestre is explaining it. Its origins are in the quilombos and the plantations, and it was outlawed in the Brazilian penal code after abolition — a prohibition aimed unambiguously at the Black population of the cities.

What broke the ban was institutionalisation. In the 1930s Mestre Bimba developed a systematised regional style and secured official recognition for a school; Mestre Pastinha, at roughly the same time, formalised the older, lower, more ritual angola style. Between them they moved capoeira from criminal offence to national symbol in about a generation.

You will see it in Pelourinho, sometimes in the tourist register with a hat passed round. The better version is in a working academy — several in the historic centre take drop-in classes — where the roda is closed, the berimbau sets the tempo and nobody is performing for anybody.

The Recôncavo, where the money was made

Salvador’s wealth did not come from Salvador. It came from the Recôncavo, the fertile crescent of land around the Bay of All Saints, where the sugar engenhos ran from the sixteenth century and where the arithmetic of the Atlantic economy was worked out in its most brutal form.

Sugar was the first genuinely industrial agricultural product, and it required capital, machinery and labour in quantities that no European workforce would supply on those terms. Brazil became the largest single destination of the transatlantic slave trade, and Bahia its principal northern gateway. Mortality on the plantations was such that the system depended on continuous new arrivals rather than on natural increase — a fact that shaped both the demography and the culture, because each new group brought language, religion and music that had not yet been ground down by a generation of captivity.

Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888. There was no land redistribution, no compensation to the freed, and no meaningful transition programme; the population that had built the economy was released into it with nothing. The consequences are visible in Salvador today in the correlation between skin colour and neighbourhood that no visitor can fail to notice and that Brazilian social statistics document in detail.

Cachoeira and São Félix, facing each other across the Paraguaçu river two hours inland, are what remains of the sugar and tobacco towns — colonial architecture, a nineteenth-century iron bridge, and the Irmandade da Boa Morte, a sisterhood founded by freed African women in the early 1800s that still holds its August festival and is one of the oldest continuously operating Black women’s organisations in the Americas.

Anyone who wants to understand what Salvador is should spend a day there. It explains the city in a way the city cannot explain itself.

Carnival, the other one

Rio’s carnival is a stadium event with tickets. Salvador’s is a street event with roughly two million people in it, built around trios elétricos — articulated trucks carrying a full sound system and a band — that move at walking pace along fixed circuits with a rope-enclosed block of paying participants around them and everyone else outside the rope.

The politics of that rope have been argued about for forty years, and the alternative tradition is where the interest is: the blocos afro, above all Ilê Aiyê, founded in 1974 as an explicitly Black carnival organisation at a time when the main clubs excluded Black members, and Olodum, whose drumming rewrote Brazilian percussion and reached a global audience through the recordings it played on in the early 1990s.

Outside carnival the rehearsals are open and, for most visitors, better: Olodum and other groups run public ensaios on set evenings in the historic centre through the pre-carnival season, which is how most of those Tuesday-night drum lines come to exist.

Two cities in one municipality

The Salvador a visitor sees is a fraction of the Salvador that exists. The metropolitan area holds close to three million people, and the great majority of them live nowhere near Pelourinho — in the periphery to the north and east, in neighbourhoods that appear on no tourist map and in the subúrbio ferroviário along the bay, served by an old rail line and a bus system that absorbs hours of every working day.

Brazil’s racial and income statistics overlap so closely in this city that they function as the same map. Salvador is among the Blackest large cities in the country by self-declaration, and the distribution of income, of sanitation coverage, of school outcomes and of police violence all follow the same gradient outward from the historic centre.

This is not a footnote to the culture; it is the condition the culture is produced in. The blocos afro were founded because carnival organisations excluded Black members. Olodum’s drumming school in Pelourinho was, from the beginning, an educational project aimed at children from neighbourhoods the tourist economy did not reach. The steps ran the other way from how they are usually narrated: the politics came first and the music was the instrument.

The honest advice for a visitor is not to treat the periphery as an attraction. Favela tourism in Brazil has a long and mostly unedifying record. What is worth doing is spending money in places that keep it here — a guide from the city rather than an agency in São Paulo, a pousada with local owners, the drum schools and cultural centres that run public events, and the restaurants and acarajé stands that are not on the square.

The sound the city exported

Bahia has supplied Brazilian music with a disproportionate share of its raw material, and the lineage is traceable in a way that most popular music is not.

The oldest layer is the drum language of Candomblé — the three atabaques, each with its own name and register, playing rhythms specific to individual orixás. Those patterns are liturgical, not decorative; a practitioner can identify which deity is being called from across a street.

Samba de roda, the circle samba of the Recôncavo, is the ancestor of the samba that went south to Rio in the early twentieth century with Bahian migrants — the famous house of Tia Ciata in Rio, where the first recorded samba was reportedly composed, was a Bahian household. UNESCO has listed samba de roda as intangible cultural heritage, which is a strange fate for a form that was for most of its life a party in a yard.

Then, in the late 1960s, tropicália: Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, both Bahians, mixing bossa nova with electric guitars, concrete poetry and pop, and being jailed and exiled by the military government for their trouble. Gil later became Brazil’s culture minister. Few countries can claim a pop movement that went from prison to cabinet inside forty years.

The 1980s produced axé, the commercial carnival sound of the trios elétricos, and the same decade produced samba-reggae — Olodum’s invention, built by slowing samba and layering it over a reggae feel, played on drums carried on shoulder straps by a hundred people at once. That is the rhythm most people outside Brazil have heard without knowing its name.

Eating in the oldest kitchen in Brazil

Bahian food is West African cooking that landed in a place with different fish. Dendê — red palm oil — carries the flavour and the colour. Moqueca is the emblem: fish or prawns stewed with coconut milk, dendê, coriander, peppers and onion, served in a clay pot with rice and farofa, and locally distinguished from the Espírito Santo version with the seriousness other countries reserve for constitutional matters.

Acarajé is the street institution — black-eyed pea fritters deep-fried in dendê, split and filled with vatapá, caruru, dried shrimp and pepper — sold by baianas de acarajé in white lace at corner stands, a trade that is itself registered as intangible cultural heritage in Brazil and has a direct religious lineage, since acarajé is a food of Iansã.

Buy it from a stand with a queue, ask for it quente but consider saying no to the full pimenta on the first attempt, and eat it standing up looking at the bay. Salvador does not really have a better recommendation than that.