Salvador da Bahia - Brazil

Bahia's capital of Salvador (the name of the city was "Bahia" until it was changed by officious meddlers at the beginning of the twentieth century) sits on a spit of land sticking south south-west into the Atlantic Ocean. And although it sits well within the tropics at a southern latitude of thirteen degrees, it receives a refreshing sea-breeze which seldom falters until the wee hours of the morning when things have generally cooled off anyway. The city sits on a huge bay, a Baia de Todos os Santos (the Bay of All Saints), and the topography is predominently hill and valley.

And it's this rugged geography which is so disorienting to people new to the city. Neighborhoods (bairros) tend to be built on the heights, with thoroughfares twisting around and between. Streets zigzag and change names, and a lot of them are one-way, necessitating roundabout ways of arriving at any given destination. It can take a long time to catch on, but by the same token it can add even more of an element of mystery to the place.

One of the principal characteristics of the city is the outgoingness of the people. People talk to strangers here, are friendly to them. People are not divided by that initial suspicion of strangers that marks so many other places, at least as far as where sociability is concerned. It's easy to meet people.

But there's another characteristic which often takes first-time visitors to Salvador by surprise: I'm referring to the city's urbanscape, its architecture, building and home styles. Colonial Pelourinho was built while Bahia was the economic powerhouse of South America, and many of the buildings are splendid. Most of the rest of Salvador was built on a shoestring, and the results range from the unpainted claybrick shacks of the poor to the reinforced concrete buildings one sees everywhere (usually in need of a painting), to the more expensive modern and generally undistinguished apartment towers found in the middle and upper-middle class neighborhoods. People expecting leafy tropical bungalows may be disappointed. This is an urban, third-world city, with plenty of crowds and traffic jams. It does, however, retain its renowned Bahian soul, and tropical serenity (along with those leafy tropical bungalows) is very close at hand.

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