The World Bank had been working with Salvador and the state of Bahia on an urban transportation strategy since 1992. The first line, running 11.9 kilometers from Pirajá in the north down to the underground Lapa station in the commercial center, was scheduled to open in 2003. It did not. Construction stalled, restarted, stalled again. A consortium of Siemens, Camargo Corrêa, and Andrade Gutierrez had done the work. The Spanish firms CAF, Dimetronic, and ICF took over the concession under a Build-Operate-Transfer contract - 25 years of operation in exchange for supplying the rolling stock and signaling. Line 1 finally opened, partially, in June 2014. The rest of the system followed in stages through 2018, with an extension to Águas Claras arriving only in 2023. For two decades, buses carried almost all of Salvador's commuters - an average commute of 94 minutes one way, according to transit data, with a third of riders spending more than two hours a day on buses.

Salvador is built on a peninsula that rises a hundred meters out of its harbor. The old colonial city sits on top of the cliff; the port and the modern commercial downtown sit below. That vertical geography is why the Lacerda Elevator, inaugurated in 1873, is still one of the city's primary pieces of infrastructure - it moves people between the upper and lower cities in 22 seconds. It is also part of why a subway here is hard. The initial 1.4 kilometers out of Lapa station is in tunnels; then the line emerges onto elevated viaducts (Brotas station, which serves the Fonte Nova stadium, is elevated) and finally drops to at-grade tracks at Acesso Norte and Retiro. Line 2 branches east at Acesso Norte and runs to Lauro de Freitas, passing through Salvador Bahia International Airport - the one metro-to-airport link in northeastern Brazil.

The official language of the project, from the World Bank documents onward, is about "connecting currently excluded low-income neighborhoods." That is not rhetoric. Pirajá, at the northern end of Line 1, sits amid some of the lowest-income parts of Salvador - the same neighborhoods that Pelourinho's 1990s gentrification displaced people into. A 25-year concession on a metro is a promise, however imperfect, that people in those neighborhoods can get to Lapa and Campo da Pólvora (the stop 900 meters from Pelourinho) and to the airport for the R$3.70 fare, with two bus transfers included on a single card. The suburban line from Calçada to Paripe, a 14-kilometer railway that has never connected with the Metro, is being converted into a 36.4-kilometer light rail - 34 stations, scheduled for 2028 - that will finally knit the coastal suburbs into the system. Each four-car train on the Metro holds 1,250 passengers. On a weekday, they run full.