By day, the cobblestones of Pelourinho are crowded with pastel façades, capoeira circles in small squares, food carts on the Terreiro de Jesus selling acarajé - black-eyed-pea fritters fried in dendê palm oil and slathered in shrimp-and-coconut vatapá. Soteropolitanos call the cooks baianas; they wear white turbans and long skirts, and most are connected to Candomblé terreiros that anchor the neighborhood's spiritual life. By night, the same streets change registers entirely. On Tuesdays, the Geronimo concert fills the Largo do Pelourinho and spills into every bar in a four-block radius. Travel guides advise watching your pockets, and they are right - Salvador has one of Brazil's higher rates of street crime, especially for visibly foreign tourists - but the same guides understate how much of Pelourinho after dark is also just Bahians having a good time. The Elevador Lacerda runs 24 hours. Use it. The long slope connecting the upper and lower cities is genuinely dangerous, even in daylight.

Salvador has kilometers of coastline, and the choice is less about prettiness than about what you want the water to do. Porto da Barra is the calmest central beach - the first landing site of Europeans in Bahia, now wedged among bars and kiosks, crowded on weekends. Flamengo and Stella Maris, further northeast, have the best water quality and the surf. Jaguaribe, Piatã, and Itapoã are where locals go - cheaper, rowdier, less English-speaking, and the guides warn you against bringing anything worth stealing. Farol da Barra - the lighthouse beach - is spectacular at sunset but rocky; the fort behind it, built in 1702, now houses the Museu Náutico. A cycleway runs 12.55 kilometers along the Atlantic from Amaralina to Piatã, but it is sparsely used; expect pedestrians in the bike lane.

Bahian food is one of Brazil's genuine regional cuisines, built on three ingredients that arrived with the Atlantic slave trade and stayed: dendê palm oil, coconut milk, and West African spice. Moqueca - a fish stew in coconut and dendê - is the flagship. Vatapá is the shrimp-and-bread-crumb paste that tops acarajé. Caruru brings in okra. The best moqueca in the city is argued about perpetually; the Largo da Santana in Rio Vermelho is where the argument gets loudest, especially after midnight when the Mercado do Peixe fills up. For something less nocturnal, the stalls on the Terreiro de Jesus in Pelourinho serve abará (steamed in banana leaf) and acarajé from baianas whose recipes in some cases descend from Candomblé ritual offerings to Iansã and Xangô. Dessert: Cocada. Coconut, sugar, sometimes burned. Sometimes not.

Salvador is the practical gateway to the whole Bahian coast. Ferries from near the Mercado Modelo run to Itaparica, the largest island in the Bay of All Saints. Faster boats run to Morro de São Paulo on Tinharé Island - four beaches with translucent water, no cars, a two-hour ride by speedboat. Praia do Forte, about an hour north on the BA-099 "Linha Verde," is a beach town anchored by Projeto Tamar, Brazil's sea-turtle conservation program. Ninety kilometers further north, Massarandupió is a semi-desert beach with a river running parallel to the ocean and a nudist section tucked behind dunes. Inland, the Chapada Diamantina - the highland plateau that feeds the Paraguaçu river - holds some of Brazil's finest trekking country. Any of these trips is bookable from Pelourinho travel agencies, usually in fluent enough English to get it right.