"Bahia de Todos os Santos " a Salvador da Bahia Travel Page by Andreas_Fran

Salvador, the capital of Bahia state, is a port city that looks out across Atlantic Ocean to West Africa - to Ghana, Nigeria, Angola. Its culture is so different from that of the Northeast's mestizo-populated interior that at times Salvador seems to be spiritually situated on the outskirts of Luanda or Lagos!

Salvador (also often called Bahia) is like many Portuguese colonial settlements with its narrow cobblestone streets, baroque churches namented with gold, and old houses decorated with the blue Portuguese tile. Yet its culturally the most African of the Brazilian cities and it also has the highest concentration of African descendents of any major metropolis in Brasil: 80% of its more than two and half milion inhabitants are black or mulatto (mixed of black and white).

Salvador has retained much of its African heritage, brought to Brasil by the enslaved peoples of the past centuries. Baianas (Bahian women) with the white skirts and headresses recal West Africa, as does the local excotic for as food.

At the time of 1549 where the first Portugal's colonial goverment was established in Brasil, the city turn his name in Sao Salvador da Bahia de Todos Os Santos (Savior Saint of the Bay of all Saints). Over the next 3 centuries, plantations of sugar and cocoa were establish along the Atlantic coast, and slave traders sold hundreds of thousand of Africans to the Bahian plantation owners.
Those people brought their music, dance, language and the religions much of which survived in a purer from in Brasil than in North America.