Cachoeira

The bridge over the Paraguaçu River connects Cachoeira to its twin city São Félix, and I crossed it on foot my first morning to get the view: the river wide and dark brown, moving slowly, edged by colonial tobacco warehouses on the São Félix side and a waterfront of crumbling grandeur on the Cachoeira side. Both cities look like they were wealthy once in a concentrated, colonial-commerce way and have been carefully preserving that fact ever since. Cachoeira is 110 kilometers inland from Salvador and has the character of a city that has absorbed several centuries of Afro-Brazilian spiritual life in a way that a coastal city, always looking outward, cannot quite replicate.

The tobacco economy built these buildings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the church towers and merchant mansions on the main praças are the physical evidence of that wealth — extraction built on slavery, as everywhere in Bahia. What differentiates Cachoeira from other colonial towns is what the descendants of those enslaved people built here: the candomblé terreiros that have operated continuously since the eighteenth century, the craft traditions of wood carving and ceramics, and the Irmandade da Nossa Senhora da Boa Morte — the Sisterhood of Our Lady of the Good Death. Founded by freed enslaved women in the early 1800s as a means of purchasing the freedom of others, the Irmandade now consists of about forty elderly women who maintain their rituals, their costumes, and their annual August procession with an authority that comes from knowing exactly who they are. I arrived outside the feast week and met a member of the Sisterhood — Mãe Zilá, seventy-two years old, a baianas vendor in front of the church — who explained their ceremony to me in Portuguese I mostly followed, and in a tone that was simultaneously gracious and entirely clear that she was doing me a favor by speaking to a stranger about sacred things.

The streets of Cachoeira reward slow walking. There are several museums of variable quality, a Casa de Câmara (colonial town hall) that still has its original furniture, and more churches per square kilometer than any city of 33,000 people should reasonably need. The artisans working in wood carving — particularly carvers of processional figures and sacred objects — have workshops on the side streets that sell work of genuine craft. I bought a small carved figure from an elderly man who seemed genuinely surprised to be making a sale and wrapped it in a grocery bag with something approaching ceremony.

The food is straightforward Bahian: the restaurants in the main praça serve moquecas and caldeiradas and the rice-and-beans baseline that functions like punctuation in Brazilian eating. I ate well without eating anywhere special. What was special was eating in a place where the context — the river outside, the colonial buildings across the street, the sound of rehearsal drums from somewhere not far away — made the simplest meal feel like part of something larger.

When to go: The Festa de Nossa Senhora da Boa Morte in August is the most important event — the Sisterhood’s procession is one of the most profound ritual experiences available to an observer in Brazil. Outside of August, visit any time from May through September for dry weather. Cachoeira is an easy day trip from Salvador (two hours by bus) but deserves at least one night to feel the pace of the place after the day-trippers leave.