Fazenda Grande do Retiro, Salvador — Area Guide & Where to Stay

What are the main landmarks in Fazenda Grande do Retiro?

Rua Mello Moraes Filho 189 is the address that matters here. The Empresa Gráfica da Bahia has held that plot since October 1972, a site of roughly 31,000 square metres, and the printed Diário Oficial do Estado still comes off its presses. Nothing on the hill is ticketed.

Up at Alto do Peru, the high shoulder above Rua do Oriente, an Embasa water tank marks the crest, and local accounts date a chapel to Nossa Senhora de Guadalupe there to about 1920, raised by the first families in mud and coconut thatch.

What is the history of Fazenda Grande do Retiro?

The name is literal. A fazenda, a working estate, held this hill before the streets did, and the neighbourhood's own account has its owner leasing the ground and selling it off in small lots from the 1940s, after an earlier sale in 1901 that ran from Melo Morais Filho down to Avenida San Martin. The road commemorates a poet.

Alexandre José de Melo Morais Filho was born in Salvador in 1844 and died in 1919, a physician who wrote verse. The 2010 census put the hill's tally just under fifty-four thousand, 86.38% of it Black or mixed-race, the fifth-largest such population among the bairros of Salvador. State printing arrived long after the fazenda: the Empresa Gráfica da Bahia dates itself to a law of 17 May 1912, opened on 7 September 1915, issued its first Diário Oficial do Estado that 30 October, and moved up to Fazenda Grande do Retiro in October 1972.

The metro came last, Estação Retiro opening on 25 August 2014 and Estação Bom Juá on 23 April 2015.

Where is Fazenda Grande do Retiro?

Fazenda Grande do Retiro is a ridge in the miolo of Salvador, the inland middle of the city, its main street running roughly three kilometres above the BR-324, with Bom Juá and São Caetano next along the highway, IAPI on the crest opposite, Largo do Tanque off its north-western end and the Itapagipe Peninsula about three kilometres north on the bay.