The airport has been renamed more than once. Opened in 1925 as Santo Amaro do Ipitanga - after the river that ran nearby - it was completely rebuilt in 1941 by Panair do Brasil with American and Brazilian government support, part of the Allied effort to secure the South Atlantic air ferry route during World War II. Ships carrying aircraft parts, petroleum, and personnel bound for Africa and the European theater staged through here during the war. On December 20, 1955, the government renamed the facility Dois de Julho International Airport, honoring July 2 - the date Bahians celebrate their state's independence from Portugal in 1823. That name stuck in the local memory. On June 16, 1998, a federal law renamed it again, this time for Luís Eduardo Maron Magalhães, a Bahian politician who had died earlier that year at forty-three. The change was and remains controversial; attempts to revert it have come and gone. Since 2017 the commercial operator has simply marketed it as Salvador Bahia Airport.

The airfield occupies more than six million square meters of coastal land twenty-eight kilometers north of downtown Salvador, pressed between the Atlantic and a strip of native restinga vegetation. The current passenger terminal opened in 1998, replacing an older facility that had become too small for the city's growing traffic. Upgrades continued through the year 2000 and again in the late 2010s under private management. The main terminal now covers 69,400 square meters, includes a shopping mall and eleven jetways, and has the capacity to handle six million passengers a year. Traffic had been growing at about 14 percent annually for years before the pandemic. The airport shares some facilities with Salvador Air Force Base, which maintains a Brazilian Air Force presence on the same field.

For most of its modern history the airport was operated by Infraero, the state-owned infrastructure company that ran the majority of Brazil's commercial airports. In 2011 a government saturation review rated Salvador Bahia as being in good shape - operating at less than 70 percent of capacity - even as complaints about crowding and service grew at other Brazilian airports. Privatization came in 2017. On March 16 of that year, the French infrastructure giant Vinci SA won the thirty-year concession for R$2.35 billion, roughly 640 million euros. Vinci announced plans to duplicate the passenger terminal, though implementation has proceeded more slowly than originally projected. The airport's access improved dramatically on April 26, 2018, when the Aeroporto station on Line 2 of the Salvador Metro opened, giving passengers a rail link directly to the Lapa hub downtown.

For most visitors to Bahia, this is the first Brazilian ground they touch. Flights arrive from across Brazil and from major South American hubs, plus seasonal European and North American services that come and go with the tourism calendar. For pilots, the approach over the Atlantic on a clear morning offers one of the more memorable airfield sights in northeastern Brazil: the runway laid perpendicular to the coast, long white beaches stretching north and south, and the vast bay of Todos os Santos visible inland. For Salvadorans, the airport is a working part of the city - reached now by Metro rather than a long taxi ride, and still approached along the bamboo-shaded avenue that earlier travelers remembered as one of the most unlikely welcomes any major airport anywhere provides.