Bahia: Sugar, Faith, Sea

Salvador and the Recôncavo through colonial power, music, and water

Six places around the Bay of All Saints where the sugar trade and the Atlantic slave trade left their marks: the cliff-split first capital of Portuguese America, the wet basement of the Mercado Modelo where captives are said to have been held, the harbor that once outshipped every port in the future United States, the 1625 amphibious assault that took Salvador back from the Dutch, and the river town of Cachoeira, a national monument and the birthplace of Brazilian nursing.

Itinerary

1. Salvador — A hundred-meter cliff cuts Salvador lengthwise -- Cidade Alta on top, Cidade Baixa along the docks -- and the cast-iron Elevador Lacerda drops 72 meters between them in 22 seconds. Below the pastel bell towers of Pelourinho and the world's largest Carnaval lies the harbor that received more enslaved Africans than any region in the Americas.
2. Colonial Brazil — Pedro Alvares Cabral put into a Brazilian bay in 1500 and sailed on within ten days; the Portuguese stayed for the red dye in a hardwood the Tupi already knew how to cut. Three products -- brazilwood, sugar, gold -- and the forced labor of millions of enslaved Africans wrote the next three centuries across this coast, from the Bahian cane fields to the baroque churches of Salvador.
3. Modelo Market — On a high tide the lower level of the Mercado Modelo -- Salvador's old Customs House, completed in 1861 and sitting below sea level -- fills ankle-deep with seawater. Local tradition holds it as a place where enslaved Africans were held on arrival; upstairs, capoeira circles spin and baianas fry acarajé in dendê oil, the answer their descendants have made to that history.
4. Port of Salvador — When American colonists were declaring independence, Salvador's harbor moved more goods than any port in the soon-to-be United States -- sugar and tobacco out to Lisbon, gold down from Minas Gerais, enslaved people in from West Africa. Cranes still work granite and cellulose onto decks directly beneath the pastel bell towers of a UNESCO World Heritage skyline.
5. Recapture of Bahia — A Dutch fleet took Salvador in a single afternoon in 1624. Philip IV answered with fifty-two warships and twelve thousand Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian soldiers -- one of the century's largest amphibious operations. They landed at Santo António beach, blockaded the harbor in a crescent of ships, and forced the Dutch garrison to surrender after weeks of siege.
6. Cachoeira — Inland on the Paraguaçu, in the sugar-and-tobacco valley of the Recôncavo, Cachoeira has its whole historic center listed by IPHAN as a national monument -- colonial sobrados and more than a dozen candomblé terreiros under federal seal. One quiet doorway on Rua Ana Nery is the birthplace of Ana Nery, who at 51 went to nurse the wounded of the Paraguayan War and became the mother of Brazilian nursing.