Bahia has a constant succession of festas and pilgrimages. Famous all over Brazil is the festa of the Senhor do Bonfim (Lord of the Good Death), the patron of the city, the Salvador or Saviour Himself. The little 18th-century church is the object of a great pilgrimage every year, just after Epiphany. Not only the Negro population or the poor people trek to the Bonfim; statesmen, politicians, generals, millionaires, all can be seen regularly in the processions, carrying lighted candles in their hands. (The other great objects of pilgrimages annually are the Basilica of Nazareth in Belém, and the biggest of all, the Sanctuary of Our Lady Aparecida in São Paulo — Nossa Senhora Aparecida being the patron saint of Brazil.)
With its large Negro and colored population, Bahia is also the center of candomblé and macumba (voodoo, or vo-dung, religions) that highly-developed, intensely emotional mixture of African cults and Catholicism. From Bahia come the great “Babylons” or “Holy fathers,” of these cults, leaders of their “churches” in Recife or Rio.
In Bahia, too, is practised the art of the capoeira, a form of combined wrestling and jujitsu, using the feet, lightning quick, graceful, — another importation from Africa.
Rio has its unsurpassed natural beauty, Recife its Flemish traditons, and São Paulo stands for progress, — but Bahia is above all the romantic city.
* * *
Bahia was built at the King’s command, to be a capital, but the origins of Rio de Janeiro were more like those of Boston, say, a century later. It was established around 1555 on the Bay of Guanabara by a group of French Calvinists, without as much as a by-your-leave to the Portuguese. The colony called itself, ambitiously, “Antarctic France”; their leader was Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon (Villegaignon Island still marks the place of settlement) and they dreamed of establishing in the New World a “Utopia” according to Thomas More.
To expel the French, who were allied with the Indians, the Governor-General of Bahia sent his nephew, Estácio de Sá, to the south. In the battle that gave the Portuguese victory over the French, Estácio, “a boy of gentle presence,” was killed by an arrow in the face, but he became the lay-patron of the city he had founded on “Dog Face Hill,” at the foot of the Sugar Loaf. For reasons of defense, the town moved across the bay to the Morro do Castelo (Fortress Hill), and it was there that the old colonial city grew up. Although still outlined by the oldest of Rio’s churches, the Charity hospital, the Arsenal, etc. — the morro, or hill, itself was removed during the first Centenary of Independence, 1922—one of those amazing land-moving and scene-shifting operations that are so characteristic of the city and so surprising to visitors. “What has happened to Rio?” the Brazilian Carioca who has been away for two or three years always asks sadly — one who had been away for twelve years had to buy the latest map of the city before he could find his way around in his home town again.
The topography of Rio is fantastically beautiful, but sadly unsuited to any geometric mathematical-minded city-planning. The city has spread out and penetrated like the fingers of a hand between the towering peaks of granite and the steep hills, which were left uninhabited until the fairly recent (about twenty years or so) growth of the notorious favelas, or slums. Although poor people had always lived on the morros it is only during the last twenty years or so that they have become covered with shacks, mostly inhabited by immigrants from the north and northeast. It is estimated that one million of Rio’s three million inhabitants now live in these slums, creating the worst of the city’s many problems. Although life in the favelas would seem to offer nothing at all, except superior views and breezes, to the poor who come to them, nevertheless — as soon as a housing project removes a thousand or so people to better quarters, the same number stream into the city and fill up the old ones. Such are the attractions of city-life, even at its worst, as compared with the same poverty, plus boredom and isolation, of life in small towns in the interior. In the city there are the lights, there is radio and television (it is surprising how many aerials for both appear above these shacks), the futebol, the lotteries, the constant excitement and a sense of participation, even if on the lowest level, in the life of a great city, to offset the misery, the standing in line for water, & the frequent visits of the police.
Rio is a city of surprises. Right at the end of its Fifth Avenue, Avenida do Barão de Rio Branco, looms up a gigantic ocean liner. A dead-end street turns into an endless flight of steep steps. Since because of its peculiar physiognomy there is, or was usually, only one way to get to any one place, tunnels have been put through in all directions, or deep cuts right through the granite mountains. Upper-class dwellers in upper floors of apartment houses often look straight into favelas only a few yards away and are awakened by roosters crowing, at the level of the 10th floor, or babies not their own crying. One story, told as true, illustrates the intimacy of this chaotic mixture. A couple returning to their 8th-floor apartment at night heard a terrific bumping and crashing going on inside and thought “Burglars!” But when the door was opened a panic-stricken horse was found inside. So close are the protrusions of rock and earth to the buildings that he had managed to fall from his minute pasture on one straight onto their terrace — and it is perfectly possible.
Between the exuberant outcroppings of rocks and mountains on one hand, and the marshes and mangrove-swamps on the other, Rio developed as a huge city, but an isolated one, and its problems of transportation have always been very difficult. There is one highway leading from it into the interior; the main streets and avenues either wind between the mountains or are built on filled-in land along the bay. Almost all the old squares and plazas were originally lagoons or mangrove-swamps. The city could not expand along the coast because the marshes were uninhabitable because of the malarial mosquito. Now, however, modern sanitation has changed all this and enormous suburbs have spread out over the former swamps.
When the Portuguese court arrived in 1808, the capital was still only a dirty colonial village. The new arrivals quickly solved the housing-problem in a summary way: the King’s quarter-masters requisitioned all the best houses for the members of the court. A bailiff merely painted on the door the letters P and R (Prince Royal). The Cariocas translated the letters in their own way as Ponha-se na Rua—“Get out in the street,”—and that was that.