Our recent trip to the Recôncavo Baiano, a name that refers to the concave shape of the Bay of Todos os Santos in Bahia, revealed a cultural landscape that has been in the making since the indigenous tupinambas inhabited its coasts and riverbanks, long before Amerigo Vespucci “discovered” this immense bay in 1501 and way before Salvador de Bahia was established as the first capital of Brazil in 1549.

As part of a Yale School of Architecture Advanced Studio trip, we set out from Salvador de Bahia towards Cachoeira, the main town in the recôncavo, settled as a sugar mill at the end of the 16th century along the bank of the Paraguaçu River. The historic chapel of Our Lady of Ajuda, built on a hill as part of this early industrial settlement still stands today, surrounded by quaint one-story houses occupied by friendly neighbors and a family of white cats. This modest chapel offers a stark contrast to the elaborate church of the Third Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel built over one hundred years later, lavishly decorated with gilt carvings and Portuguese tilework.

Although Cachoeira and its sister town of Sâo Félix on the other side of the river, seem provincial and sleepy compared to the City of Salvador, they were once thriving communities where commerce fueled by sugar, tobacco and mining industries flourished. Cachoeira was the last navigable port of the Paraguaçu River and the main access point from the coast to the Sertão (hinterland) and the mining towns of Minas Gerais.

Our visit to this area was part of a quest to learn about the experience of Lina Bo Bardi, the famed Italian-Brazilian architect, when she first came to Bahia in the 1950s, an experience that informed her later projects, such as the wooden staircase in the Unhâo complex, now the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia (MAM), the landscaping of some of the private homes she designed, and in some ways, the Ladeira da Misericórdia project in the Historic Center of Salvador, the focus of our architectural preservation studio.

Before arriving in Cachoeira, we made two stops and I was able to check off a long-time bucket list item: the 17th century Sâo António do Paraguaçu Monastery, a 2000 World Monuments Watch site, located in the village of Sâo Francisco do Paraguaçu, which at the time of its listing was threatened by neglect and exposure to the elements. During our visit, I was pleased to see that in 2004, the National Historic and Artistic Patrimony Institute of Brazil (IPHAN) had stabilized the ruins and rehabilitated the site as a cultural tourism destination. Curiously, the project included a somewhat incoherent assembly of tile shards along a wall, probably an attempt to preserve the puzzle-like fragments for a future, more careful reassembly.

Reassembled tiles in Sâo António do Paraguaçu

Our young, local guide explained that the monastery which housed up to 260 Franciscan monks and novices, was built by African slaves over a period of 28 years. These slaves, who came from the sugar plantations nearby, were around 18 years old when they came to work on the construction site, and through abuse and disease most of them perished before they reached their 24th birthday. Many of them escaped and formed maroon communities in the surrounding forests, but those who were captured in the attempt were shackled in the dungeon or mazmorra of the monastery where they were left to drown by the rising tide as punishment for running away. I looked in our guidebook for this terrifying piece of information but did not find any reference to the fate of the slaves that worked in the construction of the monastery, although I did find out that between 1559 the year the Portuguese crown officially introduced the slave trade and 1850 the year the practice was abolished, almost 4 million Africans were captured and shipped to Brazil.

Our other stop, associated with the more successful escapees, those who hid in the forest and established farming communities known in Brazil as quilombos or hideouts, was the village of Kaonge, the smallest of a group of quilombos, scattered along the shores of the Iguape bay in Bahia, which are currently living on communal land granted by the government as a meager attempt at reparation. The community of Kaonge is part of a community-based tourism initiative called Rota da Liberdade which promotes guided tours where visitors can learn about Quilombola history, dance (Samba de Roda), religion (Candomblé), music, watch the processing of manioc flour, dende (palm) oil and medicinal syrups, or visit their oyster farms which supply their oyster-centric (but delicious!) lunch menu offering. Understandably, oyster shells are everywhere in Kaonge, and its present-day shell deposits may one day resemble the sambaquis or fossilized shell middens left by the tupinambas centuries ago, before the Europeans and the Africans came to these shores - that is if President Bolsonaro does not carry out his 2017 promise to repossess their land.

The more things change, the more they stay the same…