Map - Salvador, Bahia (Salvador)

Salvador (English: Savior) is a Brazilian municipality and capital city of the state of Bahia. Situated in the Zona da Mata in the Northeast Region of Brazil, Salvador is recognized throughout the country and internationally for its cuisine, music and architecture. The African influence in many cultural aspects of the city makes it a center of Afro-Brazilian culture. As the first capital of Colonial Brazil, the city is one of the oldest in the Americas and one of the first planned cities in the world, having been established during the Renaissance period. Its foundation in 1549 by Tomé de Sousa took place on account of the implementation of the General Government of Brazil by the Portuguese Empire.

Centralization as a capital, along with Portuguese colonization, were important factors in shaping the profile of the municipality, as were certain geographic characteristics. The construction of the city followed the uneven topography, initially with the formation of two levels – Upper Town (Cidade Alta) and Lower Town (Cidade Baixa) – on a steep escarpment, and later with the conception of valley avenues. With 692,818 square kilometers in area, its emerged territory is peninsular, and the coast is bordered by the Bay of All Saints to the west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. The Historic Center of Salvador, iconized on the outskirts of Pelourinho, is known for its colonial architecture, with historical monuments dating from the 17th century to the beginning of the 20th century, and was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1985. The stage of one of the biggest Carnivals in the world (the biggest street party in the world, according to the Guinness World Records), the integration of the municipality to the UNESCO's Creative Cities Network as the "City of Music", a unique title in the country, added to the international recognition of Salvador's music.

With more than 2.9 million inhabitants as of 2020, it is the most populous municipality in the Northeast, the third most populous in Brazil (Brasília surpassed Salvador in 2016, but it is a federal district, not a municipality), and the ninth largest Latin American city. It is the core of the metropolitan area known as "Great Salvador", which had an estimated 3,957,123 inhabitants in 2020 according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). This makes it the second most populous metropolitan area in the Northeast, the seventh in Brazil, and one of the largest in the world. Also due to these urban-population dimensions, it is classified by the IBGE study on the Brazilian urban network as a regional metropolis. In its reports for the years 2014 and 2020, the Research Network of Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) classified Salvador as a global city in the "Sufficiency" category (the smallest). Global city surveys by consultancy Kearney also included Salvador in the 2018 and 2020 annual reports, while excluding it in the 2019.

The economic center of the state, Salvador is also a port city, administrative and tourist center. Its metropolitan region has the highest GDP among urban concentrations in the Northeast. In 2018, it had the second highest gross domestic product (GDP) among Northeastern municipalities. Furthermore, it is the headquarters of important regional, national and international companies, such as Novonor, Braskem, Neoenergy Coelba, and Suzano Papel e Celulose. In addition to companies, the city hosts or has hosted many cultural, political, educational, sports events and organizations, such as the Bahia State University, the Federal University of Bahia, the Brazilian Army Complementary Training School, the Brazilian Surfing Confederation, the 12th United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (in 2010), the third Ibero-American Summit (in 1993), the 2003 Pan-American Judo Championship, the second Conference of Reeheehee from Africa and the Diaspora (in 2006), the 1989 Copa América, the 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup, the 2014 FIFA World Cup, and Group E of the women's football tournament in the 2016 Summer Olympics.

Salvador lies on a small, roughly triangular peninsula that separates the Bay of All Saints, the largest bay in Brazil, from the Atlantic Ocean. It was first reached by Gaspar de Lemos in 1501, just one year after Cabral's purported discovery of Brazil. During his second voyage for Portugal, the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci sighted the bay on All Saints' Day (1 November) 1502 and, in honor of the date and his parish church in Florence, he named it the Bay of the Saint Savior of All the Saints. The first European to settle nearby was Diogo Álvares Correia ("Caramuru"), who was shipwrecked off the end of the peninsula in 1509. He lived among the Tupinambá, marrying Guaibimpara and others. In 1531, Martim Afonso de Sousa led an expedition from Mount St Paul (Morro de São Paulo) and, in 1534, Francisco Pereira Coutinho, the first captain of Bahia, established the settlement of Pereira in modern Salvador's Ladeira da Barra neighborhood. Mistreatment of the Tupinambá by the settlers caused them to turn hostile and the Portuguese were forced to flee to Porto Seguro c. 1546. An attempted restoration of the colony the next year ended in shipwreck and cannibalism.

The present city was established as the fortress of São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos ("Saint Savior of the Bay of All Saints") in 1549 by Portuguese settlers under Tomé de Sousa, Brazil's first governor-general. It is one of the oldest cities founded by Europeans in the Americas. From a cliff overlooking the Bay of All Saints, it served as Brazil's first capital and quickly became a major port for its slave trade and sugarcane industry. Salvador was long divided into an upper and a lower city, divided by a sharp escarpment some 85 m high. The upper city formed the administrative, religious, and primary residential districts while the lower city was the commercial center, with a port and market.

In the Roman Catholic Church, Brazil and the rest of the Portuguese Empire were initially administered as part of the Diocese of Funchal in Portugal but, in 1551, Salvador became the seat of the first Roman Catholic diocese erected in Brazil. The first parish church was the mud-and-thatch Church of Our Lady of Help (Igreja da Nossa Senhora da Ajuda) erected by the Jesuits (Society of Jesus), which served as the first cathedral of the diocese until the Jesuits finished construction of the original basilica on the Terreiro de Jesus in 1553. Its bishop was made independent of the Archdiocese of Lisbon at the request of King Pedro II in 1676; he served as the primate of the Congo and Angola in central Africa until the elevation of the Diocese of Luanda on 13 January 1844 and its bishop still serves as the national primate and premier see (diocese) of Brazil.

In 1572, the Governorate of Brazil was divided into the separate governorates of Bahia in the north and Rio de Janeiro in the south. These were reunited as Brazil six years later, then redivided from 1607 to 1613. By that time, Portugal had become temporarily united with Spain and was ruled from Madrid by its kings. In 1621, King Philip III replaced the Governorate of Brazil with the states of Brazil, still based in Salvador and now controlling the south, and the Maranhão, which was centered on São Luís and controlled what is now northern Brazil. As Spain was then prosecuting a war against the independence of the Dutch, the Dutch East and West India companies tried to conquer Brazil from them. Salvador played a strategically vital role against Dutch Brazil, but was captured and sacked by a West India Company fleet under Jacob Willekens and Piet Hein on 10 May 1624. Johan van Dorth administered the colony before his assassination, freeing its slaves. The city was recaptured by a Luso-Spanish fleet under Fadrique Álvarez de Toledo y Mendoza on 1 May 1625. John Maurice, Prince of Nassau-Siegen, tried to conquer the city for his country, unsuccessfully besieging it between April and May 1638. In 1763, the colonial administration was removed to Rio de Janeiro and elevated to a viceroyalty. Salvador remained the heart of the Recôncavo, Bahia's rich agricultural maritime district, but was largely outside Brazil's early modernization. The area formed a center of royal Portuguese support against heir apparent Pedro I's declaration of independence from European Portugal on 7 September 1822. Its elites initially remained loyal to the Portuguese crown while rebels from Cachoeira besieged them for a year until finally receiving Portugal's surrender of the town on 2 July 1823, which is now celebrated as Bahia Independence Day. The local elite was similarly hesitant during Manuel Deodoro da Fonseca's later coup that established the republic in 1889.

Owing to whales' use of the Bay of All Saints as a mating ground, Salvador became a large whaling port in the Southern Hemisphere during the 19th century but the trade had already begun to fall off by the 1870s.

Under the empire and republic periods, however, the town slowly began to industrialize. In 1873, Brazil's first elevator, the powerful hydraulic Elevador Lacerda, was constructed to connect the city's upper and lower towns. Having undergone several upgrades, it continues in use. By the First World War, it was joined by a second elevator and Salvador was connected to four railroads: the Bahia & Alagoinhas to Joazeiro, the Bahia Central, the Nazareth Tramway, and a short line to Santo Amaro. Its central districts and the major suburbs of Bomfim and Victoria were served by four streetcar lines, which had begun to electrify. It also served as a port of call for most steamship lines trading between Europe and South America.