Cheap holidays to Salvador

Brazil Salvador

There are certain countries, the names of which fire the popular imagination. Brazil is one of them; an amalgam of primitive and sophisticated, jungle and elegance, beating drums and luscious jazz harmonics — there’s no other place like it in the world.

And while Rio, or its fame anyway, tends toward the elegant and sophisticated end of the spectrum, Bahia tends toward the other. Bahia is the land of the drum, of capoeira and candomblé.

Bahia’s capital of Salvador (the name of the city was “Bahia” until it was changed by officious meddlers at the beginning of the twentieth century*) sits on a spit of land sticking south south-west into the Atlantic Ocean. And although it sits well within the tropics at a southern latitude of thirteen degrees, it receives a refreshing sea-breeze which seldom falters until the wee hours of the morning when things have generally cooled off anyway. The city sits on a huge bay, a Baia de Todos os Santos (the Bay of All Saints), and the topography is predominently hill and valley.