Salvador stacked two cities on a cliff above All Saints Bay
Salvador, capital of Brazil's Bahia, once bore a long colonial dedication to the Holy Savior overlooking the Bay of All Saints. It sits on a triangular peninsula dividing Brazil's largest bay from the Atlantic. Over 2.4 million residents in 2020 make it the Northeast's biggest city and Brazil's fifth.
Europeans first reached the peninsula with Gaspar de Lemos in 1501, and on All Saints' Day 1502 Amerigo Vespucci, sailing for Portugal, named the bay after the date and his parish church in Florence. The first settler was the castaway Diogo Álvares Correia, called Caramuru, wrecked off the point in 1509, who lived among the Tupinambá and married Guaibimpara. A settlement founded in 1534 by Francisco Pereira Coutinho, first captain of Bahia, collapsed after abuse of the Tupinambá turned them hostile, and the colonists fled to Porto Seguro around 1546.
Tomé de Sousa, Brazil's first governor-general, founded the present city as a fortress in 1549 on a cliff above the bay. It served as the colonial capital and grew rich as a port for sugar and the slave trade. An escarpment about 85 metres high split it into an upper town of government, churches and homes and a lower town of docks and commerce. In 1551 it became seat of Brazil's first Catholic diocese, whose first cathedral was a Jesuit church of mud and thatch.
The capital moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1763. When Pedro I declared independence in 1822, Salvador's elite stayed loyal to Lisbon until rebels from Cachoeira forced a Portuguese surrender on 2 July 1823, still marked as Bahia Independence Day. In 1835 Muslim enslaved Africans rose in the Malê revolt, the largest slave uprising in Brazil, which fed abolitionist sentiment; slavery ended only in 1888 with Princess Isabel's Golden Law.
Whales mating in the bay made the city a major nineteenth-century whaling port until the trade faded in the 1870s. In 1873 the hydraulic Elevador Lacerda, Brazil's first elevator, linked the two levels, and it still runs. Today more than 2.4 million people live in the municipality.
Source: Salvador, Bahia
