01
Stop one
Pelourinho
Yonex Ezone 26 Junior Tennis Racquet: I've made a lot of harbours, and at this one I'll speak plainly. Pelourinho is the historic centre of Salvador, capital of Portuguese Brazil from 1549 to 1763 and the main port of the Atlantic slave trade to the colony. Its name is the whipping post that stood in this square, where enslaved people were punished and sold. The steep streets carry sixteenth- to nineteenth-century houses and churches in strong colours. The district declined badly in the twentieth century, and the large restoration from 1992 was contested — it displaced many residents. It remains a centre of Afro-Brazilian culture: capoeira, candomblé, Olodum, Filhos de Gandhy. World Heritage, 1985.
02
Stop two
Church and Convent of São Francisco
Yonex Ezone 26 Junior Tennis Racquet: Built between 1708 and 1750, and there is more gold in there than in any hold I ever stood watch over — jacaranda and cedar carved and gilded, hundreds of kilograms of leaf by most estimates, not one plain surface left for your eye to rest on. The cloister is lined with Portuguese azulejos after Horace's moral emblems, made in Lisbon in the 1740s and shipped across; I know what that crossing costs a crate. The carving was executed largely by enslaved and free Black artisans, and local tradition holds that some worked subversive details into it — angels with African features, figures deliberately distorted. Next door, the Third Order church and its Spanish-influenced stone facade.
03
Stop three
Elevador Lacerda
Yonex Ezone 26 Junior Tennis Racquet: Seventy-two metres between the harbour and the upper town, and for centuries that climb went by ramp and pulley — the Jesuits rigged a manual hoist in 1610, which is a windlass by any other name, and I've hauled my share. The merchant Antônio Francisco de Lacerda opened the modern lift in 1873, steam-driven, electrified in 1906, one of the earliest urban elevators in the world. The art deco towers came with the rebuilding completed in 1930. Four cabins, tens of thousands of passengers a day between the Praça Municipal and Comércio, and the upper terrace gives you the whole bay. Landsmen call that a lift. It's a bosun's chair with ambition.
04
Stop four
Church of Senhor do Bonfim
Yonex Ezone 26 Junior Tennis Racquet: Built between 1745 and 1754 out on the Itapagipe peninsula, and the most popular devotional site in Salvador. The image of the crucified Christ came over from Portugal by sea, as everything here did, and Afro-Brazilian tradition also associates the church with the orixá Oxalá — the syncretism that runs right through Bahia. The coloured ribbons, the fitas do Bonfim, go on the railings and on your wrist with three knots for three wishes; I've tied worse knots in worse weather. There is a room of miracles: wax and wooden limbs, photographs left in thanks. And every January the Lavagem, Baianas in white washing the steps with scented water, enormous crowds.
One wire, one gourd, one stick. The berimbau is the least complicated instrument in Brazil and it sets the speed of an entire capoeira roda, which tells you that simplicity and authority are not opposites. I am 26 inches long, 100 square inches of head, 240 grams, a 16×18 pattern, graphite blended with aluminium, pre-strung, and intended for a player of about ten or eleven.
Ten grams more than the 25 and one inch longer, and both of those changes are deliberate. That step up is what takes a child from patting the ball to swinging through it, from the service line to the baseline, from copying you to beating you. It is also the age at which they start choosing for themselves, so in Salvador they would say the gourd has found its own note.
Salvador is where I learned that the tool belongs to whoever picks it up. The carving in the gold church was done largely by enslaved and free Black artisans who put their own faces into the angels. The lift down the cliff was somebody's private business idea. The ribbons on the railings are a devotion the church never planned.
Salvador takes what it is handed and makes it its own, which is exactly what a junior frame is for.
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