Salvador's pastel heart
Pelourinho
The old upper town of Salvador da Bahia: steep cobbled squares lined with pastel colonial houses and churches.
Why Pelourinho is bahia blue
Pelourinho is the historic centre of Salvador, the first capital of colonial Brazil and long the main port of entry for enslaved Africans. Its name means pillory, after the whipping post that once stood in the square. The district is the largest group of Portuguese colonial buildings in the Americas: tall houses with white-framed windows, painted blue, yellow, pink, green and lilac, and churches rich with gold inside. After a long decline it was restored in the 1990s. It is the centre of Afro-Brazilian culture, with drumming groups, capoeira and Bahian women in white lace dresses. Coloured wish ribbons from the Bonfim church are tied to railings all over the city. It is a World Heritage Site.
Values are fair approximations of what the eye sees there, not measurements.
Written by the Rang desk with AI assistance. Background: "Historic Center of Salvador" on Wikipedia. If you know Pelourinho and we have it wrong, tell us.
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🇧🇷 Painted hill town of carnivalOlindaA colonial town on hills above the sea near Recife, with bright house fronts, white churches and palm trees.
🇧🇷 White walls, coloured framesParatyA colonial port between forest and sea, where every house is white and every door and window frame is a bright colour.
🇮🇳 The Blue CityJodhpurOld-city houses washed in blue crowd the foot of Mehrangarh Fort, on the edge of the Thar Desert.🇮🇳 Town of mud-resist block printBagruA small town near Jaipur where the Chhipa community prints cotton by hand in indigo, black and red.
🇮🇳 Prayer flags over a high desertLehStrings of five-coloured prayer flags and white stupas stand out against the brown mountains of Ladakh.
🇵🇰 City of saints and blue tilesMultanBrick shrines of Sufi saints are banded with blue, turquoise and white tiles, a craft still alive in the city.Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Jodhpur In: Lavpatel2008, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Leh In: Vyacheslav Argenberg, CC BY 4.0, source
- Multan Pk: Yaarahmadd, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Olinda Br: Valdiney Pimenta, CC BY 2.0, source
- Paraty Br: Lampiao3, Public domain, source