Pirajá is a Tupi word. *Pirá* means fish. *Îá* means full. Together: *that which is full of fish*. The original inhabitants chose the name for a reason - the streams draining toward the Cobre River once teemed with the kind of abundance that fed villages. The Jesuits noticed. In the early years of Portuguese colonization, they built the village of São João de Plataforma here and founded some of Bahia's first sugar mills - El-Rei and Pirajá among them. In the São João mill, owned by the Society of Jesus, the great seventeenth-century preacher Father António Vieira delivered his first sermon in 1633. The Estrada das Boiadas, one of Brazil's oldest cattle roads, ran over these hills. The Enseada do Cabrito nearby offered the only truly sheltered anchorage for ships near Salvador. For three centuries Pirajá was the quiet outer ring of the colonial city - until war came to it.

When Brazil declared independence from Portugal in September 1822, most of the country accepted the change within weeks. Bahia did not. Commander Inácio Luís Madeira de Melo held Salvador for the Portuguese crown with a garrison and a fleet. The independence forces, under the French general Pierre Labatut - appointed by Prince Regent Pedro I in July 1822 - laid siege to the city from the countryside. On November 8, 1822, the two sides met in the Cabrito-Campinas-Pirajá area with roughly ten thousand troops total, making this the largest engagement of the whole Bahian independence war. It was here, after Bugler Lopes's lucky or strategic error, that the tide turned. The soldiers of Pernambuco - seasoned veterans fighting alongside the Bahians - pressed the advantage. The Portuguese retreated to Salvador. The siege continued for another eight months, but the battle of Pirajá was the turning point that made the outcome inevitable.

In Largo de Pirajá, the neighborhood's main square, stands the Pantheon - a memorial holding the remains of General Labatut and honoring the soldiers who fell in the battle. Every July 1, the day before Bahia's Independence Day, a ceremony here receives the Symbolic Fire carried across the Recôncavo Baiano from the villages where the independence militias were first organized. The next day, July 2, the Symbolic Fire joins the massive independence procession that sweeps through central Salvador - an entirely distinct holiday from the September 7 independence of Brazil as a whole, and in Bahia a much bigger one. Pirajá's neighborhood crest, its civic identity, and its annual ritual all run back to what happened on those hills in 1822.

Honesty requires saying this: Pirajá today is not a tourist district. The neighborhood sits along the BR-324 highway and the Salvador railway suburbs, and it works for a living. Bus company garages, wholesale warehouses, auto-parts shops, a dry port, a major bus station that carries the neighborhood's name, big housing complexes, the Cobre Dam, and São Bartolomeu Park. The infrastructure keeps the city running. The neighborhood also struggles. A 2012 violence map in the *Correio* newspaper, using IBGE and state security data, placed Pirajá among the most dangerous neighborhoods in Salvador, with a homicide rate far above the UN threshold for extreme violence. That reality coexists with another one: Pirajá is home to Cortejo Afro, an Afro-Brazilian cultural association whose percussion group walks these streets in the Carnival procession every year - and whose work the singer Daniela Mercury immortalized in her song *Preta*. What the neighborhood has always been is a place where Brazil's identity gets worked out in public. That has not changed.