Saude (Health) -- is an old, interesting, somewhat crumbling neighborhood in the style of Pelourinho but with no commercialization for the tourist trade.

From Pelourinho, Saude lies just across from the Baixa dos Sapateiros (Cobbler's Low Area, so called because it traces the divide between the hills of Pelourinho and Saude and because of a common trade once practiced there).  Nowadays the Baixa dos Sapateiros is given over to cheap shops with hawkers calling out to potential customers as they pass on the sidewalk, but in the 1930's the area -- or presumably a lovely young thing in the area -- inspired the great Ary Barroso to write what has become Bahia's most enduring "theme song", Na Baixa do Sapateiro ("In the Baixa do Sapateiro"; for some reason the song title is in the singular).

Listen to "Na Baixa do Sapateiro"


Cine Jandaia

The Cine Janadaia in the Baixa dos Sapateiros is where the film which inspired the adoption of Indian garb -- and thereafter the adoption of Gandhi's name -- by afoxé Filhos de Gandhy, was shown in 1949 (the film was Gunga Din). Carmen Miranda sang here in 1932, witnessed by an eighteen-year-old Dorival Caymmi (who would later figure so importantly in Carmen's adoption of stylized Bahiana fashion, following her recording of his O Que É Que a Baiana Tem?).

Moving back in time, before the Baixa dos Sapateiras was a street it was a stream called Rio das Tripas (Tripe River)...where the unwanted refuge of Salvador's slaughterhouse district (Barroquinha) was tossed (Barroquinha's slaughterhouses are long gone, the area since having become a city bus terminal).

Igreja da Barroquinha, on the Ladeira da Barroquinha (to the right)

Barroquinha was named for a church (Nossa Senhora da Barroquinha) behind which, incidentally, the precursors to Salvador's oldest continually existing houses of candomblé were founded (Casa Branca and Gantois). The church was also the seat of the Confraria de Nossa Senhora da Boa Morte (Sisterhood of Our Lady of the Good Death) -- a group mixing elements of Catholicism and candomblé -- which subsequently decamped for the town of Cachoeira (where their festa is held yearly, in August).

Ribeira -- Ribeira has several senses, one of which is a coastal area where the water completely washes out at low tide, allowing the maintainance and repair of boats. There was such an area where the Segunda Distrito Naval (Second Naval District) is now located...

Segundo Distrito Naval

...an area which at one time was known as Ribeira das Naus (a nau being a three-masted ship). The name ribeira came to denote this entire part of the city (nowadays known as comércio; praia, or beach, was also used to denote this area, from which is derived the last part of the full name of the church Igreja da Nossa Senhora da Conceição da Praia).

Space being insufficient here for the volume of work to be done, a similar enterprise was set up on another ribeira on the peninsula of Itapajipe (alternatively spelled "Itapagipe"), with the name Ribeira dos Galeões, and this is the area today known as Ribeira.

Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays are big days on the beaches and in the bars and restaurants of Ribeira, Mondays because this was the day-off for a large contingent of workers at the Pólo Petroquímico industrial park in Camaçari, to the north of Salvador. Cozido, a vegetable-and-meat stew, is traditional Monday fare in the beachside restaurants.

Segunda-Feira Gorda (Fat Monday) is a festa popular in Ribeira, falling on the Monday following the Lavagem do Bonfim (which always falls on a Thursday).

Pituba/Itaigara -- are two neighborhoods which in fact merge to form one, and doing likewise with Caminho das Árvores (Trail of the Trees) they form a triumverate of middle and upper-middle class Salvador, home to doctors, engineers, and lawyers. These areas are usually not interesting to visitors seeking local flavor, though even here one may see rodas de capoeira in open areas in the evenings. I lived in this area for a year.

Barris (Barrels) -- ...Hey! That's where I live now! I like it because it's right smack in the center of the city and close to a lot of good stuff. Plus it's quiet, in spite of being a three-minute walk to Carnaval. Around the corner, on Saturdays, when the high school gets out, there's usually samba da roda (making that high school doubly different from mine in Indianapolis -- we didn't have classes on Saturday and we sure as hell didn't have any samba de roda!).

The name comes from the fact that people would fetch water (or send to have it fetched) -- in barrels -- from a freshwater spring located in a valley between what is now Barris and what is now the neighborhood of Tororó (that valley is now the Lapa city bus terminal).

Barris was home to one of Bahia's principal slave traffickers, the Marquês de Barbacena, whose once sumptuous mansion is now a crappy public school. The house passed from the Marquês's hands to those of another slave trafficker, Domingos José Martins, who in 1806 hosted Napoleon Bonaparte's youngest son Jérôme in the house.

Tororó is is another central neighborhood, which for some reason (or perhaps for no reason at all!) is fertile ground for great sambistas. Paulinho do Reco has lived there all his life...

Paulinho do Reco in Cana Brava Records

One of Paulinho's best known compositions is Negrume da Noite (Darkness of the Night), which he wrote for bloco afro Ilê Aiyê. Below is Virgínia Rodrigues' version...

Sambistas Walmir Lima and Ederaldo Gentil are also from Tororó. Below, Ederaldo sings his O Ouro e a Madeira (The Gold and the Wood)...

And below is Mariene de Castro's version of Walmir Lima's Ilha de Maré (Tide Island), accompanying clips from the film Ó Paí, Ó (set and filmed in Pelourinho; Ilha de Maré is the film's theme song). There is rather a bit much of Emanuelle Araújo's butt-wagging here, something that the average Bahiana on the street is better at, but whatever... Emanuelle used to sing for Banda Eva, replacing Ivete Sangalo when Ivete went solo. Getting back to Walmir, he's 80 years old now and is still going strong, singing his sambas and everybody else's!

Garcia is just across the way from Tororó, named for a family which once owned the land and extending from the working-class end around the public square to the middle-class end at Campo Grande. Garcia is home to one of Salvador's premier sambistas, a 5 foot 4 inch package of dynamite by the name of Clementino Rodrigues but generally known as Riachão (riachão is "creek"...when Riachão was a small boy he was known for always being in fights, one day one of the older folks asking him, using an adage common to the area, "Are you a creek that can't be crossed?" And he's been Riachão ever since). Three of Riachão's compositions were recorded by the immortal Jackson do Pandeiro.

Below is the trailer for a documentary on Riachão...sweet!

Santo Antônio (Saint Anthony) -- is pretty much of an extension of Pelourinho, though much more given to residencial living. Santo Antônio is part of Salvador's Centro Histórico and and most of the houses date from the colonial era. At the far end from Pelourinho is the Largo (square) de Santo Antônio, banked by a church (Santo Antônio of course) and a fort (the Forte de Santo Antônio, in keeping with the trend), the fort being home to a lot of capoeira angola. Gilberto Gil lived in Santo Antônio, and decades before him Josué de Barros, who would "discover" Carmen Miranda and introduce her into the world of professional singing.

Igreja Da Terçeira Ordem do Carmo, in Santo Antônio

Pituba/Itaigara -- are two neighborhoods which in fact merge to form one, and doing likewise with Caminho das Árvores (Trail of the Trees) they form a triumverate of middle and upper-middle class Salvador, home to doctors, engineers, and lawyers. These areas are usually not interesting to visitors seeking local flavor, though even here one may see rodas de capoeira in open areas in the evenings. It was here that Caetano Veloso was living in the late 1960s when he was arrested by the dictatorship, imprisoned for two-and-a-half months, and then exiled.

Rio Vermelho (Red River) -- is where the great Festa da Yemenjá (goddess of the sea) takes place on February 2nd. It was home to the writer Jorge Amado and is currently home to singer Gal Costa (who bought her house overlooking the Praia da Paciéncia -- Patience Beach -- from musical colleague Caetano Veloso). Gilberto Gil has a home in the area too. Lots of bars and restaurants.

Carybé's rendering of the Largo de Santana, in Rio Vermelho

Nowadays...

The name comes from a "river" giving onto the Atlantic Ocean (I use quotes because what was at one time a small river has become a concretized gutter), the name of this river being "Camurujipe", a Portuguese twisting of the original Tupí "Camarajibe" -- or "River of the Camarás".  Given that a camará is a small red flower which in earlier times grew in abundance here in Salvador, a more accurate rendering would be "Rio das Flores Vermelhas" ("River of the Red Flowers"), but that's quite a mouthful of syllables.

Ondina -- Carnival ends here (see the "Carnival" section), several kilometers up from Barra. Ondina has a nice urban beach and some of the big, standard-style hotels (Othon Palace, etc.). Up on a bluff overlooking Ondina proper is the Alta da Ondina (Ondina Heights) with a lovely, windswept, and almost lonely-feeling view of the Atlantic and city below. There's a restaurant up there taking advantage of that view, the eponymous Alta da Ondina. I haven't eaten there, so although I can recommend the vista, I'm not in a position right now to say anything about the establishment itself (other than it looks good). A large part of the Federal University of Bahia campus is in Ondina, as well as the city zoo.

Subúrbio (Suburbia) -- is, as the name implies, not a single neighborhood, but comprises rather the neighborhoods on the city's perimeter. And, in great contrast to Europe or the U.S., this is not where the working middle-class flees to; it is where the vast majority of the city's poor people live. Some of the neighborhoods encountered as one follows Avenida Suburbana along the inside of the bay are Alagados (literally "Flooded"; these are the houses on stilts that one sometimes sees in photographs or paintings), Plataforma, Ilha Amarela ("Yellow Island", which isn't an island at all but was christened during an epidemic of yellow fever, when the area was quarantined), Periperi, and Paripe.

Most of this area looks like the Garden of Eden after having been scattered by God with clay-red dice. The dice are where people live, their dwellings (the humbler ones are called "barracos") built up a little bit at a time (finances permitting) using the clay block ubiquitous to Brazil. It is very rare that the outside of the block is finished, people preferring to devote their limited resources to the inside. The main streets are usually (badly) paved, but most of the others are dirt paths populated by children, dogs, and roosters. The immediate impression is usually not of grinding poverty, but this is almost a trick of the light. People make do and get by, barely; conversation, radio, TV, dominoes, family, the occasional beer and get-together making up the day-to-day activities. Public education in these areas is a national disgrace, the government pleading poverty while earning salaries, benefits, and retirement packages worthy of King Midas (in addition to the perks of rampant and endemic corruption).

Periperi is home to and seat of bloco afro/musical-social organization Ara Ketu.

Campo Grande (Big Field) -- is not strictly a neighborhood, but the name of what is essentially the Central Park of Salvador is used for the surrounding area. The park is the beginning and end point for the Campo Grande - Praça Castro Alves Carnival circuit. (one of two, the other being Barra - Ondina). At Carnival time Campo Grande is full of barracas, Port-A-Potties, and, up in the reviewing stands, government bigwigs anxious to demonstrate that they are a part of the povão ("people", with overtones of riffraff) too.

Cosme de Farias -- was originally called Quinta das Beatas due to the fact that a large part of the land on which the neighborhood was founded belonged at one time to a nunnery ("quinta" is an expanse of land, and "beatas" is akin to "religious", per "beatified").  Sometime during the 1960s a man small in stature and great of heart moved from the Rua da Independência -- close to the Baixo dos Sapateiros -- to Quinta das Beatas, and this neighborhood eventually came to bear his name.   The name was something unneeded by writer Jorge Amado...he took rather the life and personality of his friend and upon these built the character Damião de Souza in his novel Tenda dos Milagres (Tent of Miracles)...a thin disguise in that the twin saints Cosme & Damião are an important part of life in Bahia.  Sr. de Farias' funeral procession in 1972 -- from Pelourinho to the cemetery at Quintas do Lázaros -- was the largest to ever have taken place in Bahia.

Lawyer/Savior of the poor by day, bohemian by night

Cosme de Farias would say "Na Bahia, quem rouba um tostão é ladrão. Quem rouba um milhão é barão" (In Bahia, somebody who steals a nickel is a thief. Somebody who steals a million is a baron.")

São Domingos, on the Terreiro de Jesus

Cosme de Farias's "office" for serving his poor clients was in the open door to the right above, now selling handmade shirts, tourist paraphernalia, etc.

Alagados (Flooded) -- * Note: This is taken from the "Volunteer Work" page. -- Alagados means "flooded", and refers to shacks built over water on stilts, a scene frequently and picturesquely displayed in a lot of guide books. These "houses" are not picturesque at all; they are horrid and dangerous both in terms of human violence and health and sanitation conditions. "Jardim Cruzeiro" means "Garden Cross", and this is an area built over garbage landfill set just in from Alagados, over what used to comprise Alagados itself. Jardim Cruzeiro now looks like any other poor neighborhood in Salvador, and for longtime residents that is a big step up.