Location: Salvador 🌎

Salvador (English: Savior) is a Brazilian municipality and capital city of the state of Bahia. Situated in the Zona da Mata in the Northeast Region of Brazil, Salvador is recognized throughout the country and internationally for its cuisine, music and architecture. The African influence in many cultural aspects of the city makes it a center of Afro-Brazilian culture. As the first capital of Colonial Brazil, the city is one of the oldest in the Americas and one of the first planned cities in the world, having been established during the Renaissance period. Its foundation in 1549 by Tomé de Sousa took place on account of the implementation of the General Government of Brazil by the Portuguese Empire. Centralization as a capital, along with Portuguese colonization, were important factors in shaping the profile of the municipality, as were certain geographic characteristics. The construction of the city followed the uneven topography, initially with the formation of two levels – Upper Town (Cidade Alta) and Lower Town (Cidade Baixa) – on a steep escarpment, and later with the conception of valley avenues. With 692,818 square kilometers in area, its emerged territory is peninsular, and the coast is bordered by the Bay of All Saints to the west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. The Historic Center of Salvador, iconized on the outskirts of Pelourinho, is known for its colonial architecture, with historical monuments dating from the 17th century to the beginning of the 20th century, and was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1985. The stage of one of the biggest Carnivals in the world (the biggest street party in the world, according to the Guinness World Records), the integration of the municipality to the UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network as the “City of Music”, a unique title in the country, added to the international recognition of Salvador’s music. With more than 2.9 million inhabitants as of 2020, it is the most populous municipality in the Northeast, the third most populous in Brazil (Brasília surpassed Salvador in 2016, but it is a federal district, not a municipality), and the ninth largest Latin American city. It is the core of the metropolitan area known as “Great Salvador”, which had an estimated 3,957,123 inhabitants in 2020 according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). This makes it the second most populous metropolitan area in the Northeast, the seventh in Brazil, and one of the largest in the world. Also due to these urban-population dimensions, it is classified by the IBGE study on the Brazilian urban network as a regional metropolis. In its reports for the years 2014 and 2020, the Research Network of Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) classified Salvador as a global city in the “Sufficiency” category (the smallest). Global city surveys by consultancy Kearney also included Salvador in the 2018 and 2020 annual reports, while excluding it in the 2019. The economic center of the state, Salvador is also a port city, administrative and tourist center. Its metropolitan region has the highest GDP among urban concentrations in the Northeast. In 2018, it had the second highest gross domestic product (GDP) among Northeastern municipalities. Furthermore, it is the headquarters of important regional, national and international companies, such as Novonor, Braskem, Neoenergy Coelba, and Suzano Papel e Celulose. In addition to companies, the city hosts or has hosted many cultural, political, educational, sports events and organizations, such as the Bahia State University, the Federal University of Bahia, the Brazilian Army Complementary Training School, the Brazilian Surfing Confederation, the 12th United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (in 2010), the third Ibero-American Summit (in 1993), the 2003 Pan-American Judo Championship, the second Conference of Reeheehee from Africa and the Diaspora (in 2006), the 1989 Copa América, the 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup, the 2014 FIFA World Cup, and Group E of the women’s football tournament in the 2016 Summer Olympics.