Salvador

The berimbau starts it, then the atabaques, and a ring opens in the street with two players inside. Dendê palm oil is frying somewhere above, in a district of three thousand buildings from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries where the churches, archives, cinemas and second-hand bookshops all still open on a Tuesday. This is the largest colonial ensemble in Latin America, and people are getting on with their lives inside it.

IPHAN has the historic centre listed and UNESCO recognises it, but the reason to walk it is what got built here and what refused to leave. In the Igreja de São Francisco every interior surface is covered, walls and columns and ceiling and chapels alike, carved and then gilded; the foundation stone went down in 1708, the church was done by 1723 and the last of the complex in 1782. Around 1830, three African women of the Nagô nation founded a candomblé house on a plot behind a Catholic church, and in 1984 IPHAN chose that house as the first non-Catholic temple ever listed as Brazilian heritage. The Festa do Senhor Bom Jesus do Bonfim has run every year since 1745 and openly articulates two religious systems at the same time, Catholic and Afro-Brazilian. Carnival is the other extreme, and the city runs it like a civil emergency: six official days, 168 beds, more than thirty SAMU ambulances and over three thousand health workers, who treated 5,047 people in February 2026.