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Salvador was where Brazil began. Portuguese colonists founded it in 1549 as the colony's first administrative capital, and for the next two centuries it was the main port through which enslaved Africans were brought to work the sugar plantations of Bahia. That history is inextricable from everything the city is today. The Pelourinho -- the historic hilltop neighbourhood whose name refers to the whipping post at its centre -- is a UNESCO World Heritage Site of faded colonial grandeur: cobblestoned alleys, ochre and blue and rose-painted facades, churches with Baroque interiors gilded within an inch of their structural limits.

The Afro-Brazilian culture that survived slavery and prohibition and official disapproval is the living culture of Salvador.

Candomblé ceremonies still take place in the terreiros of the city's outer neighbourhoods, conducted in Yoruba, following traditions carried intact across the Atlantic. Capoeira was developed here as a form of resistance disguised as dance. Acarajé -- deep-fried black-eyed pea fritters filled with dried shrimp, vatapá and caruru, sold from white-dressed women on street corners -- is one of the great street foods of the world. The Lacerda Elevator, an Art Deco vertical lift built in 1873, connects the Upper Town to the waterfront Lower Town and costs about fifty cents. Use it.