Pelourinho

The steep descent from the upper Pelourinho (the Cidade Alta) down through the historical centre is one of the most charged walks in the Americas. The architecture is ornate and inconsistent in the way that living cities are: pastel eighteenth-century baroque churches stand next to twentieth-century concrete, and the sound of Olodum drums drifts from a practice session in a cultural centre. The named square at the heart of the district, Largo do Pelourinho, is where the slave market operated for centuries, and the name (which means whipping post) is a direct reference to the public punishments that were administered here. This history is not softened or hidden; it is written into the plaques on the buildings and the character of the place.

The churches of the Pelourinho are extraordinary by any measure. The Igreja de Sao Francisco (Church of Saint Francis) is sheathed in gold leaf inside and out: the interior is so saturated with gilded woodwork that it takes several minutes for the eyes to adjust, and the neighbouring churches along the square each have their own visual character. The church of Nossa Senhora da Conceicao da Praia is neoclassical; the Igreja de Sao Domingos is simpler and more severe. These buildings survived the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and multiple cycles of abandonment and restoration.

The district's social history is inseparable from its visual beauty. Salvador was Brazil's largest slave port from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, and the Pelourinho neighbourhood was the administrative and commercial heart of that trade. The cobbled streets that tourists walk today were laid for the passage of merchant goods and the people who were sold in the plaza. The Afro-Brazilian cultural identity of the neighbourhood -- expressed through candomble religion, Olodum and other drum groups, and capoeira martial arts -- developed in resistance to the violence of that history and is now the district's living culture.

The physical restoration of the Pelourinho in the 1990s and 2000s -- funded in part by UNESCO and the Brazilian government -- transformed a neighbourhood that had been scheduled for demolition into a World Heritage Site. The restoration was controversial: many of the original residents were evicted and replaced by tourist infrastructure, hotels and art galleries. The neighbourhood that now greets visitors is genuinely historic and genuinely contested: the beauty is real but the relationship between that beauty and the people who have always lived here is complicated.

The visual experience of the Pelourinho changes at different times of day. Morning light turns the pastel facades warm and three-dimensional; midday makes the shadows crisp; late afternoon brings golden light that photographs well and draws the tourist crowds. The district's nightlife -- the restaurants, bars and live music venues -- begins after dark and the Olodum performances on weekend evenings are among the most powerful cultural experiences available in Salvador.

The colour palette of the restored buildings -- yellow, pink, blue, terracotta -- is not original to the colonial period; the pastel scheme dates from the 1990s restoration and is itself a historical layer. The original colonial buildings would have been rendered in white or ochre limewash, as many buildings in the older parts of the lower city remain. This is worth knowing when you are walking: the beauty you are looking at is partly a reconstruction of an imagined past.

The most significant collection of colonial architecture in the Americas, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site that preserves not just buildings but a layered history of Portuguese colonisation, the slave trade and Afro-Brazilian cultural resistance.

The living cultural presence of candomble, Olodum and capoeira gives the neighbourhood a contemporary identity that most restored historical districts lack; it is not a museum but a lived neighbourhood.

The view from the upper Pelourinho over the Baia de Todos os Santos at sunset is one of the great urban vistas of Brazil, combining the bay, the city grid and the ocean in a single frame.