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By Saki Knafo
Photograph by Oliver Pilcher
This is where the African highs were brought, probably the first thing you want to know about Bahia, were brought from the west coast of Africa to paintings in the vast sugar cane fields that once helped make Portugal one of the richest empires of the Nearly 1. 7 million enslaved Africans came to Brazil for the slave trade , and the country was the last in the Americas to outsource the practice. Today, Bahia is the maximum African state in Brazil, with more than three-quarters of its 15 million Population has its roots in the Atlantic, but in reality, this is just another way of saying that Bahia is the highest Brazilian state of Brazil, because many of the country’s contributions to the world, from its carnival to its capoeira , were created for the first time in Bahia through Africans and their descendants and continue to grow and thrive there today.
On Resende Beach in Itacaré, a surf spot south of Salvador
My week in Bahia started last November in Salvador, the largest city in Northeast Brazil and the center of Afro-Brazilian culture. My guide, Conor, picked me up at the airport and maneuvered through the traffic along the seashore. Salvador, home to nearly 3 million more people, is near the southern tip of a peninsula that separates the sea. ‘immense Bahia de Todos Santos (All Saints Bay) from the sparkling blue waters of the Atlantic and climbs up an upper escarpment. The 150-year-old Lacerda elevator transports other people from the lower component of the city, the Cidade Baixa, to the upper component, the Cidade Alta. Just ten years ago, Brazilians spoke of Salvador as a bankrupt city, lamenting its higher crime rate, dilapidated infrastructure, deserted buildings. But the years that followed saw his fortune increase. As Conor led me to the elegant Fasano Salvador, a recent opening for the complicated Brazilian logo with outposts in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and a component of the developing number of luxury hotels to bet on the prospects. of the city in recent years, praised the revitalization projects of the young mayor, Antônio Carlos Magalhães Neto. “It’s like a dog with a bone,” Conor said. “Once he says he’s going to do something, he does it.
We saw evidence of these efforts while driving: teams of personnel were placing new asphalt on the roads, and in a luxurious old building, structure underway at the Brazilian Music Museum, a tribute to the illustrious musical heritage of a city where Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso were pioneers of Afro-Brazilian sound, is Tropica.
Neto, who is obviously not lacking in ambition, said he intends to position Salvador as the first cultural destination in all of Latin America. If he succeeds, it will not be the first time that Salvador wears this crown. Four centuries ago, when Rio de Janeiro was little more than a pirate’s nest, Salvador was the capital of Brazil. It is one of the only cities in America that still largely resembles what it was when it was created in colonial times. Pelourinho, the historic district, is part of a UNESCO World Heritage site, with steep cobbled streets twisting at all directions and stone squares flanked by gold-covered Portuguese cathedrals. Throughout the day and into the night, the sounds of elaborate drums bounce off the facades of the great old houses, which are painted in the colors of the tropics: papaya orange, mango yellow, sea blue. Wednesday, Brazil has been severely affected by COVID-19, with Bahia being the fifth state with the highest inflammation in July; lock means those sounds have probably been muted for now. One night, as we were rushing to see a dance performance at a local theater, Conor and I ran into a crowd that had gathered on a narrow street to witness an impromptu performance through one of the district’s drum teams. Abandoning our plans, we stayed there swaying to the thunderous rhythms of Banda Olodum, a mythical samba-reggae organization that plays the Salvador Carnival every February, which rivals Rio as the largest in Brazil, if not the world. “It’s not complicated being here,” Conor said. “There is spontaneity and a sense of pleasure, you know?”
I kept realizing that my adviser to Africa’s highest open-air African city is as Irish as I could expect to meet west of Galway, yet Conor has lived in Salvador since 1982, and he knows everything. the world. One of his friends is Mestre Valmir, a charismatic capoeira teacher who welcomed us to his middle school and told us about the origins of martial art, telling how slaves evolved it into sugar cane fields, adopting musical tools and acrobatic movements to lie. to their oppressors, thinking they were dancing, rather than practicing some form of self-defense. We saw his scholars take turns facing each other in the middle of a circle as he led an organization of musicians in the berimbau or musical arc. The wrestlers planted their hands on the ground and turned their heels with maximum sensitivity to each other while consciously avoiding contact. “Capoeira makes you respect others,” he explained. “You don’t need to hit the other person, you just have to prove that you can. “
Another friend of Conor’s is Tereza Paim, owner and chef of Casa de Tereza, one of the many restaurants that have turned Salvador into a thriving culinary city in South America. Conor and I share a mockca, a spicy fish stew cooked in the ubiquitous dend azéite, a thick orange oil derived from the berries of the African palm. smell of onions and tomatoes, fish and spices were mixed on the table in bright colors. Ingredients from all over the Portuguese empire merged before us into something delicious: the history of Bahia was summed up in its culinary essence.
The Mara Peninsula
Spicy Fish Stew of Casas Bahía Salvador
A third friend of Conor’s presented a gripping account of a vital side to this story. Daré Rose is an educator and Filha de Santo – Congressman – from Candomblé, a Brazilian faith born of ideals and customs who traveled to Salvador from West Africa in the holds of slave ships. As recently as the 1970s, his supporters were persecuted through the government, but they kept the faith, and today in Brazil they number in the millions. Daré brought us the whitewashed walls of his terreiro, a construction where candomblé is practiced, located in the middle of an extension of forest in a peripheral domain of the city. The temples, discreet stucco and wood structures, were in stark contrast to the golden extravagance of the Baroque churches that dominated the central squares of the city. Some were decorated with undeniable carvings or designs that represented other orixás, as the deities of Candomblé are called. They come with Xangô, the ax-wielding god of thunder, and Yemanjá, the fish-tailed goddess of the sea. Since the 1950s, prominent Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado and wayward painter Carybe have held prestigious honorary positions in the community, Daré told me. Together with photographer Pierre Verger, they drew foreign attention to Salvador’s colorful culture and the everyday lives of its people, drawing a scale from Pablo Neruda, Simone de Beauvoir, and Fidel Castro.
Salvador was a bastion of the Brazilian left at that time, and still is. One night, we sneaked into a crowded bar called O Cravinho, where cachaça infused with cloves and other spices filled a row of kegs that lined a top shelf along the wall. On television, former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, was delivering what you may see was a moving speech, even if you don’t hear it above the joyous commotion at the paneled bar. A Supreme Court resolution had just led to Lula’s release from prison, where he had served one year and part of a 12-year sentence for corruption. He had taken bribes, of course, but no one I met in Bahia doubted the sincerity of his determination to improve the lives of Brazilians of color. During my travels, his nemesis, far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, led an attack on his affirmative action political and social systems, which had been widely credited with lifting millions of Brazilians out of poverty. In the bar, the elderly watched television with tears in their eyes. Watching from the sidewalk, a woman in a wheelchair who must have turned 90 spilled a plastic cup on her lips.
If you are visiting Brazil, you are probably also looking for quiet beaches and herbal splfinishour scenes, and you can find superlative versions of any of them without venturing out of Bahia, a state throughout France with a diversity of dazzling landscapes. In recent years, more and more people have been attracted to the remote Marao Peninsula, an inch of land with mangroves, waterfalls, sparsely populated islands, a beautiful rainforest and miles and miles of idyllic beaches. As I stayed, I first boarded an hour-long flight from Salvador to Ilhéus, the region’s former faded pole, the so-called Cocoa Coast, until a plague decimated in the 1980s. on a dirt road that runs along the peninsula. The car bounced and deflected, but I wasn’t complaining. The difficulty of reaching from one end of Marao to the other has kept the peninsula away from the predations of the Big Deve lopers.
Cabana do Bobo on the beach of Resende
My hotel, Casa dos Arandis, which was located between the palm-lined beach and the rainforest, had the relaxed atmosphere of a surf retreat, with reclaimed wooden bungalows and Tibetan prayer flags floating in the salty breeze. my porch, I can hear the tumult of the Atlantic beyond the groups of tropical vegetation that shade the sandy paths. Running on the beach, I met 3 other people in the one mile area. The co-owner, a surfer in his early 1960s, was a white boy from Rio nicknamed Cacau, meaning “cocoa,” and although he tried to explain to me the origin of the nickname in a new bowl of locally grown acai, it was a confusing story and they gave me served cocoa fruit nectar in a glass of liquor as soon as they pulled me out of the car and continued to offer me throughout my visit , rarely adding cachaza to milky ragweed, promoting its myriad nutritional benefits.
Recovered wood and hammocks at the level of Casa dos Arandis, facing the Atlantic in Marao
A position for Casas dos Arandis
Cacau is confident that customers in the local cocoa industry will return to their former glory. A growing number of farmers, many of whom were his friends, were adopting biological strategies and other environmentally sound practices, as a component to prevent the types of diseases that had plagued cocoa farming in the region in the past. Every morning at the hotel, I would sit at a table laden with their produce, not just cocoa beans, but also bananas, papaya, and mango, and a cherry-like fruit called pitanga. only coconut milk and coconut water, all local and organic. One day after breakfast, I followed Cacau on a paddle board through a maze of mangroves to an uninhabited island where some of his farmer friends were growing all kinds of fruits he had never heard of, let alone flavor. I bit into a capiá, a yellow ball with the texture and taste of a sweet potato, then one of the peasants cut into pieces an oblong, orange pod of cocoa, with a corrugated and leathery skin. We were all smiling at each other as we chewed the sweet lemon pulp, spitting out the sour seeds that are used to make chocolate.
There are waterfalls thirty meters high, cactus taller and old white shells at the back of the ponds.
La Chapada Diamantina, my last refuge in Bahia, is a national park in the serto, the rugged interior that undulates in the interior of northeastern Brazil. It is difficult to summarize the surprising scale of the place, the good appearance of the landscapes and the natural ecological variety without resorting to a recital of its greatest successes. I think of its dozens of waterfalls, a few hundred meters high, and its cacti, many of which become taller than houses, and their ordinary caves, which attract speleologists from all over the world, and a freshwater pond covered with ancient white shells so small that you can put dozens on the tip of your finger.
The land is most commonly dry and rocky, ruled by dramatic cliffs and hills. The expanses may remind you of the southwestern United States or the Black Hills of North Dakota, but then you’ll see a small capuchin monkey running down a cliff or tree that loses its bark every day so the green skin underneath can pull out. energy directly. from the sun, and you will realize that there is no other position like this in the world. Amid all this herbal appeal is an explosion of non-herbaceous colors, the colonial pastel color of the city of Lençóis. I spent 4 nights at the Hotel Canto Das Águas, a mobile inn of pink and green stones on the banks of a tumultuous river. In the morning, I would sit on the terrace with my coffee and watch birds like jewels pecking at the papaya that the staff had prepared for them in bowls. At night, he would walk down a walkway that led into the city center, where dozens of backpackers sat outside in restaurants that lined the cobbled streets, while buskers played and sang bossa nova classics.
Portuguese influence in Salvador’s old town
A view of Chapada Diamantina National Park
Decades ago, this town wasn’t that charming. For a brief period consistent with the 19th century, it was the diamond capital of the world, and Africans and their descendants of the region eventually worked in the region’s mines. . My guide, Mil, told me that mining corporations would buy diamonds from staff at just 1. 5 cents according to market price and, in maximum cases, probably less, because staff were necessarily confined to their remote colonies and had no way of verifying the situation. . to rate themselves. Mil said his father was underage. The circle of relatives lived day by day, exchanging diamonds for bags of tapioca and beans. Now the mines were closed and the population worked as guides, exploiting the good looks of the park itself.
Every day, Mil would take me to a lovely place that surpassed everything he had shown me the day before. One morning, we walk along a river in a striped gorge dotted with pink quartz spots. Another day, we entered the darkness of The Twelve Lapa Cave as Mil frequently commented on the ghostly stalagmites revealed in the ray of his lantern (“This looks like an owl. This looks like the birth of Jesus when he was born”).
A game of dominoes in Salvador’s
On my last day, Mil said there was a view I probably had to see, we had to drive two hours to get to the beginning of the trail, then walk a few more hours after that, but value it. When I asked Mil what it meant, he said no one knew. The Africans had given him this call a long time ago, and now its forgotten meaning.
We climb a steep path to the most sensitive plateau, then walk about 3 kilometers through a savannah. Occasionally new striking floral species appeared: hairy cacti. Purple flowers in the shape of slippers. Bright red fragments of filiform petals escaping rocks. The view, when we were nevertheless given there, was as impressive as promised, through the green valley to the colossal grey cliffs that emerge like boats from a sea of leaves.
Putting myself in an ideas frame of mind, I get the idea of everything Mil had told me on a previous hike. We had talked about Bahia, which makes it special, when Mil argued, as Bahians do, that samba was invented there, despite what other people in Rio will tell you. He stalled on the court, pressed his wrists behind his back, and stood very still, touching his ankles. In the days of slavery, he said, if you were caught practicing capoeira or candomblé, or committing some other transgression in the eyes of your oppressors, this is how they would pick you up, hands and feet tied in combination, infrequently for days. . at the end. But if you stayed there and didn’t move, you would die. Your blood would avoid flowing. So you moved your feet an inch at a time. One foot forward, the other back. Samba. “It was necessary,” he said, searching for me intensely. He felt the point was vital enough to repeat. “It was necessary. ” It was Bahia. A charming place where other people had endured unimaginable cruelty while creating a culture that made it even more charming.
Several airlines, adding LATAM, fly to Salvador from New York and Miami Panama City and Sao Paulo. The Tour Operator Matueté can set up customized itineraries around Bahia, adding guides, transfers and accommodation. Prices varient. matuete. com
This article gave the impression in the October 2020 factor of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.
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