Bahia

I stepped off the bus in the Pelourinho at seven in the morning and walked straight into a candomblé procession. Women in white lace and turbans, flowers in their hands, drums moving through the cobblestones like something subterranean. No one was performing for tourists. They were simply going somewhere. That was the moment I understood that Bahia operates on frequencies most of the country does not.

Salvador is the capital, and it is one of the most disorienting cities I have encountered in Latin America — disorienting in the best sense, the sense of having your internal compass quietly reset. The Cidade Alta, the upper city, is a mass of baroque churches built on the backs of enslaved Africans whose descendants are still here, still practicing their religion, still cooking their food, still playing their music in the praças at dusk. The Mercado Modelo at the base of the Lacerda elevator is where you buy your acarajé — the black-eyed pea fritter split open and stuffed with vatapá, caruru, dried shrimp, and chili — and eating one standing up in the salt air with the bay behind you is about as close to a defining meal as I have had anywhere. The dendê oil that goes into everything here is not a flavoring. It is a statement of origin.

Beyond Salvador, the coastline unfurls in ways that are genuinely hard to describe without sounding like a brochure. The Chapada Diamantina is the inland counterpoint — a highland plateau of waterfalls, cave systems, and hiking trails through cerrado scrubland, completely unlike the coast and completely within the same state. Morro de São Paulo and Boipeba are the islands people come for, and they deserve the reputation, but the Dendê Coast south of Salvador — Valença, the river crossings, the small fishing villages — rewards the traveler willing to piece together connections on local boats. Itacaré sits at the point where the Atlantic rainforest meets the sea, and the surfing there feels almost incidental to the landscape itself.

When to go: June through September is dry season in Salvador and the coast — manageable heat, no flooding on the dirt roads that connect the smaller villages. The Festa de Santa Bárbara in December and the Festival do Rio Vermelho in February are extraordinary if you want to see the city at its most itself, though both coincide with heat and crowds. The Chapada Diamantina is best from May to September, when the waterfalls are full but the trails are not submerged.

What most guides get wrong: They treat the Pelourinho as the destination and the rest of Salvador as the setting. The real city is in Bonfim, in Liberdade — the largest Afro-Brazilian neighborhood in the country — in the working restaurants on the Barra waterfront where the menu is handwritten daily and the moqueca comes in a clay pot the size of a small planet. The Pelourinho is a museum of itself. The rest of Bahia is alive.