Who ruled Salvador?

Salvador sits on a peninsula at the mouth of the Bay of All Saints, on Brazil's north-eastern coast, its old centre perched on a steep escarpment above the harbour. The great bay offered a safe anchorage, and the low, fertile lands around it, the Recôncavo, were ideal for sugar cane. Founded in 1549 as the first capital of Portuguese Brazil, Salvador was for two centuries the most important city in the South Atlantic. Its history is inseparable from sugar and slavery: more enslaved Africans arrived here than at almost any other port in the Americas, and their descendants made it the centre of Afro-Brazilian culture.

Tupi-speaking peoples, above all the Tupinambá, lived in villages around the bay when a Portuguese expedition named it on All Saints' Day, 1 November 1501. For decades only a handful of castaways and traders lived among them. In 1549 the Portuguese crown sent Tomé de Sousa as the first governor-general of Brazil, and on 29 March he founded the city of São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos, with Jesuit missionaries under Manuel da Nóbrega among his company. The town was built on two levels: the upper city on the cliff held the governor's palace, churches and houses, while the lower city by the water held the port, warehouses and markets. In 1551 it became the seat of Brazil's first bishop.

As the capital of colonial Brazil, Salvador grew rich from the sugar mills of the Recôncavo, which depended on enslaved labour. Indigenous workers were used at first, but as they died in epidemics or resisted, planters turned to captives shipped from West and Central Africa through the Atlantic slave trade, and later especially from the Bight of Benin. The city's wealth paid for dozens of churches and convents, among them the Franciscan church covered in gilded carving.

While Portugal was united with Spain, the Dutch Republic treated Brazil as enemy territory. A Dutch West India Company fleet captured and plundered Salvador on 10 May 1624, but a combined Spanish and Portuguese fleet retook it on 1 May 1625, and a later Dutch siege in 1638 failed. The discovery of gold in Minas Gerais shifted the colony's centre of gravity south, and in 1763 the capital moved to Rio de Janeiro. Salvador remained a major port, tied to the sugar and tobacco economy and to the slave trade with Africa.

The city was a centre of unrest. In 1798 the Tailors' Revolt, inspired by the French Revolution and supported by artisans, soldiers and free people of colour, called for a republic and the end of slavery; its leaders were hanged. When Brazil declared independence in 1822, Portuguese troops held Salvador until patriot forces besieging the city forced them out on 2 July 1823, still celebrated as Bahia's independence day. In January 1835 Muslim Africans, many of them Yoruba and Hausa, led the Malê revolt, the largest urban slave uprising in Brazil's history. It was crushed within hours and followed by executions, floggings and deportations, but it deepened the fear of rebellion among Brazil's slaveholders.

After abolition in 1888 Salvador was eclipsed by the booming south-east, but Afro-Brazilian traditions such as Candomblé, capoeira and its carnival flourished. The restored Pelourinho, the historic upper city, was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1985. Salvador today is the capital of the state of Bahia, with about 2.4 million people, one of the largest cities in Brazil.