The history of the fortifications and defence of Salvador da Bahia reflects the evolution of defensive strategies and the military and colonial context of Brazil.

Since its foundation in the 16th century, Salvador has established itself as a crucial strategic point for the defence of the Portuguese Empire in the New World.

This importance led to the construction and constant improvement of its fortifications, which were designed to protect the city against a variety of threats, from foreign invasions to attacks by local groups.

The first fortifications consisted of simple structures, such as rammed earth towers, reflecting the building practices of the time. Over time, the need for more robust defences led to the construction of imposing stone and lime fortifications.

These structures not only illustrate the military engineering techniques of the time, but also show the adaptation of defences to the growing sophistication of war tactics and artillery.

Each phase in the history of Salvador’s defences reveals an aspect of the military concerns and technologies available at different times.

From the first fortification projects to subsequent renovations and extensions, the evolution of Salvador’s fortifications highlights the strategic importance of the city and its role in protecting Portuguese interests in Latin America.

Nothing is more important in the memory of Salvador than its historic buildings, including its forts, fortresses and defences.

Among these are the fortifications, which have become obligatory on postcard pictures, tourist advertisements and other documents about the city.

According to the English military historian Charles Boxer, the presence of a single fortress justifies a visit to any city.

Salvador can still boast many of them, in a reasonable state of preservation, capable of evoking the past and the memories of the uprisings, revolts and invasions of our soil.

Although it may seem paradoxical that they are set against the backdrop of violent struggle, fortifications have had a great poetic appeal since the Middle Ages and even before.

They captivate and fascinate the modern observer, regardless of the intense historical background they accumulate, which in itself would have enormous appeal.

The prominence of the fortifications in the urban landscape undoubtedly represents the imposition of the tactical and strategic need to position them in an elevated position with a privileged view of the surrounding areas.

But the military engineer who designed and built them cannot be denied the aesthetic sensibility he absorbed from the culture of his time and from the texts of the most prominent architectural theorists of the Renaissance and the Baroque.

The treatises of these engineers are full of quotations from the architectural masters of the past, whose teachings undoubtedly contributed to the formation of their creative sensibility.

The bastioned fortifications are not far behind. Although they were influenced by the new-age rationality needed to withstand the great destructive power of firearms, they showed the coherence of the resolution of function, which almost always led to the quality of form.

In this field, where no concessions could be made to the superficial, the result is usually a good architecture, very pure in form, with a harmonious arrangement of volumes and perfect integration with the morphology of the terrain.

The formal simplicity is inherent to the function, and there is no recourse to decorative resources, which could make the fortification more fragile from a tactical point of view.

Where they existed, the decorative concessions were more than limited: a bocel or cordon separating the parapet from the skirt (the sloping part of the wall below the parapet), but which had a certain practical function; a portcullis, with ornament inspired by the ancient Greco-Roman orders, mainly the Tuscan (a variant of the Doric); some moulding on the sentries and basta.

It is worth characterising two moments in the poetics of the modern. fortifications:

• In the first period, construction was entrusted to Renaissance architects and artists, who did their best to sell their models to potential clients, especially in the 16th century.
• In the second period, the task of fortification passed into the hands of military engineers and the trend towards sobriety intensified. It’s not that engineers abandoned the canon of beauty, but the pressing need to counterbalance the destructive power of weapons of war increasingly pointed to pragmatic solutions.

Videos about Salvador’s Fortresses and Defences

Fortresses and defences of Salvador BA

1. A history of three centuries
2. The first walls
3. The entrenchments built by Luís Dias
4. The first towers
5. The conditions for the defence of the city

1. A history of three centuries

Salvador was born as a strong city, or at least that was what King João III of Portugal wanted, and while it was the capital or head of Brazil, there was constant concern to defend it.

For this reason, the first governor-general of the colony, Tomé de Sousa, who was commissioned by the king to establish the capital, brought with him in 1549 the master Luís Dias, an expert in fortifications.

Dias applied the traces (drawings, projects) of the Kingdom to the country, building high ramparts to defend the nascent capital of Portuguese America.

From then on, Salvador would have become a strong city, as established by King João III in the Regiment entrusted to Tomé de Souza?

It is necessary to recognise that, contrary to what some ufanist historians have claimed, Salvador remained very vulnerable to external attacks from modern, well-organised armies of the time, equipped with artillery, which was already quite efficient from the 17th century onwards.

The dizzying and disorderly growth of the city, especially from the 17th century onwards, made it difficult to build a secure fortified perimeter in accordance with the good postulates of the art of defence of the time.

In the case of Todos os Santos Bay, the problems multiplied because, being one of the largest bays on the planet, the openness of its bar meant that it was impossible to restrict the access of enemy ships, which could pass offshore, far from the reach of the cannons, without being harassed by artillery.

In addition to these difficulties, there were financial limitations: Portugal was not a rich country, and the Royal Treasury opened its coffers very sparingly for investments in America, given the problems it had with its possessions and colonies in Africa and Asia, and its indebtedness to European countries.

The development of our fortifications thus depended mainly on taxes on wine, sugar, whale oil and other trade products.

However, the influx of these resources was incompatible with the needs of large-scale fortification, as required by the defence of the capital.

The concern about Salvador’s vulnerability is not just an impression that can be gleaned from reading old documents.

It is made very clear, especially in the writings of specialists in military affairs, especially the engineers who worked or lived in the city.

For example, Diogo de Campos Moreno, Sergeant Major and Captain of the Coast of Brazil at the time of Governor General Diogo Botelho, highlighted the frailty of the city’s defences in a report in 1609.

However, there were those who considered our defences “sufficient”, such as D. Francisco de Souza, Governor-General of the great Portuguese overseas colony between 1591 and 1602. There are only two possible interpretations of this flattering opinion:

D. Francisco did not understand the subject, which is quite likely, or he was trying to justify not taking better care of the situation when he was in a position to do so.

The Livro que dá razão do Estado do Brasil – 1612, attributed to Diogo de Campos Moreno, is quite succinct when commenting on the state of the defences of Cabeça do Brasil: “This presidio should be maintained while the fortification of the citadel is so far behind schedule and the city is an open village, exposed to all dangers as long as this part is not fortified […]”.

There was no shortage of other warnings to the courts of Portugal and Spain about the precarious state of our defences.

In the years leading up to the Dutch invasion of 1624, when there were rumours of preparations by the Batavians, there was an intense exchange of correspondence on the subject.

But at that time the need to build the Laje Fort, the controversial defence of the port of Salvador, which many historians have confused with the São Marcelo Fort, was still being discussed.

But what Diogo Botelho wanted was much more than that: he clamoured for a citadel, given the difficulty of defending the entire perimeter of the capital.

As the fortification of Salvador had not been completed, the Dutch easily entered in 1624.

When they took possession of the square, they tried to fortify it, as they, being good experts and belonging to one of the most respected European schools of fortification, considered the city unprotected to ensure its defence.

The first thing the invaders did was to clear the firing ranges around the city.

They tore down not only the undergrowth, but also some of the buildings that obscured the view of the archers.

They set up defensive positions on the ground at the Hermitage of São Pedro (next to the present Forte de São Pedro) and at the present Oteiro do Barbalho; they also organised defences at the Santo Antônio Além-do-Carmo; they dammed the River Tripas, creating the Dique pequeno, later called the Dique dos Holandeses, along what is now the Baixa dos Sapateiros, and other defences.

These fortifications are mentioned in official Portuguese documents and by chroniclers of the invasion and recovery of the City of Bahia from the Dutch, including Johann Aldenburgk, a doctor in the Dutch squadron, and the Spaniards Tamayo de Vargas and Valencia y Guzmán.

In the period following the invasion and recapture of Salvador, it was clear that it was important to fortify the city and Morro de São Paulo, the key to the defence of the Three Villages, the old name given in royal documents to Cairu, Boipeba and Camamu, which were considered to be the granaries that supplied Salvador.

The full demonstration of the fragility of our defences, given by the Batavian seizure of the capital, meant that the Portuguese government, which was also involved in the Wars of Restoration, decided to improve them, investing some funds from the Royal Treasury, but above all creating more taxes on goods.

In the city, some defensive works were restored and/or improved, especially during the administration of D. Diogo Luís de Oliveira (1627-1635), as the Dutch enemy continued to threaten to invade.

Resentful of the attempted conquest by Nassau in 1638, and even after Portugal regained autonomy from Spain (1640), the Lusitanians undertook some defensive works, especially during the short-lived but enlightened administration of Viceroy Jorge de Mascarenhas, the first Marquis of Montalvão (1640-1641).

However, the work concentrated on strengthening some existing positions and restoring old defences, especially those left by the Dutch in 1625.

Under Governor Antônio Teles da Silva (1642-1647), Montalvão‘s work continued and construction began on the extended perimeter of new ditches.

Needless to say, the Portuguese Crown invested little in this project, which was financed by taxes and voluntary contributions from the inhabitants of the city and the Recôncavo.

You can get an idea of this new fortified perimeter from a drawing of the plan of Salvador drawn much later, in 1714, by the French military engineer Amédée Frézier.

In the mid-17th century, construction began on the Fort of Nossa Senhora do Pópulo e São Marcelo, whose design was influenced by that of the Bugio Fort on the Tagus. The work, designed to prevent landings in the city’s port, dragged on for many years until the 18th century.

However, an anonymous report, probably dating from 1671 or 1672, makes unflattering remarks about most of the forts mentioned.

At the end of the 17th century, Captain Engineer João Coutinho arrived in Salvador from Pernambuco at the behest of the Court. It was only then that an attempt was made to draw up a large plan to defend the city, which the captain found unprotected.

Coutinho’s project was never realised, except for a few parts. A statement to this effect is contained in the Speech of Bernardo Vieira Ravasco (brother of Father Antônio Vieira), who was Secretary of State and War for many years: “The engineer [João Coutinho] died, then Governor Mathias da Cunha, everything has remained the same to this day, and only the ruins and the trees have grown […]”.

One of the main reasons for the difficulties in defending Cabeça do Brasil was the disorderly growth of the city.

It’s true that there were ordinances and regulations that were supposed to regulate land occupation, but we lived thousands of miles from the kingdom and a strong atavism encouraged non-compliance.

As a result, abusive constructions took over the urban space, with the “blind eye” of some administrators and even with the approval of the City Council.

The City Council was benevolent towards its friends and protégés, allowing what it could not allow by law, i.e. building “on the salt flats”, as the sea land was called, which belonged exclusively to the King, who was responsible for granting such permission.

To this must be added the invasion and use of trenches and redoubts as backyards, the removal of gravel from fortifications to build private houses, the use of fortress moats for grazing cattle, the opening of accesses through escarpments and counter-escarpments, and similar works.

The Lower Town suffered most from disorderly growth.

The Foot of the Mountain was cut off for building, mainly in the interests of the Traders who wanted to take advantage of the narrow strip of land between the escarpment and the sea.

As a result, problems with the stability of the slope and the invasion of the sea with buildings blocking the firing range of the few existing forts, estancias and platforms made defending the harbour impossible.

The Report of Captain Engineer João Coutinho in 1685 and the documents of the military engineers who succeeded him in the early 18th century clearly describe this situation, which seems to have continued throughout the century.

As the century drew to a close, the threat of invasion continued and the Portuguese Crown once again decided to build a decent system of fortifications for the Portuguese capital of the Americas.

Right from the start, in 1709, Field Master Lieutenant Miguel Pereira da Costa was sent to Bahia as a permanent engineer.

In correspondence he expressed his despair at finding a city completely unprepared and without any defences to deal with a possible enemy.

To a certain Father Mestre, possibly a Jesuit and his former teacher, he said in a letter dated 18 June 1710: “[…] everything here is most helpless, the place open and exposed to any invasion […]”.

In a preliminary report he commented: “[…] these are the works that are in this square for its defence, and they are all in a miserable state […]”.

Recognition by the Portuguese Crown of the fragile state of the defences of important Brazilian cities such as Salvador, Recife and Rio de Janeiro led the Portuguese monarch to grant João Massé the rank of brigadier to come to Brazil.

His mission was to improve the defences of this and neighbouring cities.

At Salvador, Massé relied on the collaboration of local engineers who already knew the terrain, such as Mestre-de-campo Miguel Pereira da Costa and Captain Gaspar de Abreu, a professor at the Bahia School of Military Architecture.

As usual, little of the majestic fortification project proposed for Salvador, the original drawings of which were lost but copies of which survive, was actually carried out, and the defence of this prison was left for later.

The same happened in other cities.

The transfer of the capital to Rio de Janeiro in 1763 put an end to the possibility of Salvador being adequately fortified. The Pombaline period passed and it was the Marquis himself who reported on the state of our defences in a letter to the Viceroy of Brazil, dated 3 August 1776, Sobre o Verossímil Projeto de Invasão, Bombardeamento e Contribuição, ou Saque, da Bahia de Todos os Santos.

In this document, His Excellency said that the Marquis of Grimaldi had advised the King of Spain not to attack the southern part of Brazil, which was better garrisoned and more distant: “that he should order an attack on other more convenient and safer places; or on the ports where we are less prepared, which are Bahia and Pernambuco“.

In short, the Portuguese government was not unaware of the weakness of our defences.

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2. The first walls

Documents of the time provide an interesting detail about Salvador’s defences in the early days. They were built out of fear of the natives rather than foreign invaders.

This view would only change over time.

With this information in mind, it can be said that the city enjoyed reasonable defensive conditions in the early days of its foundation.

Although the natives were skilled archers, knew the terrain and were men of unusual courage, they could not stand up to the colonists with more than their rudimentary weapons.

To counter this threat, the precarious rammed earthen wall, which had the flavour of a medieval defence, did its job adequately.

Built under the supervision of the master builder Luís Dias, the wall followed the general plans of the kingdom, attributed to the architect and military engineer Miguel de Arruda.

As it turned out, the city grew rapidly, as chroniclers make clear, including the Portuguese coloniser Gabriel Soares de Sousa, author of the Descriptive Treaty of Brazil in 1587, or Notícia do, Brasil.

Thus, as the greed of other European peoples made the Brazilian coast the scene of incursions by corsairs, adventurers, smugglers and, later, state-sponsored companies, Salvador, the Head of Brazil, became the target of growing interest.

Documents from the 16th century, such as the correspondence of Luís Dias himself and the Rules for the Payment of Contractors, speak of the first rammed-earth wall, which, according to the Bahian historian and folklorist Edison Carneiro (1912-1972), was 16 to 18 palms (3.52 to 3.96 m) high.

When it was rebuilt after the collapse of the Invernadas in 1551, it was 11 palm trees (2.42 metres) high.

We can only guess at its length and where exactly it ran, as no evidence has been found other than a section of wall at the Carmo Gates.

However, even with the reduction in height and the application of protective plaster, these defences were very short-lived, as Gabriel Soares de Sousa attests. The defences were also short-lived, and were rebuilt using the same technique by Governor General Francisco de Souza, who administered the colony between 1591 and 1602.

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3. The entrenchments built by Luís Dias

The rammed earth walls that surrounded the original Cabeça do Brasil were inadequate for the defence of the city, mainly because of its altitude (around 70 metres above sea level).

This situation made it difficult for the enemy to take the city from the harbour, forcing them to climb steep slopes, but it didn’t help to prevent landings because the artillery of the time, working at that height, had an accentuated dark field and could not fire downwards.

In response to this problem, Luís Dias tried to create some platforms, stations or even redoubts in the Ribeira area (the old lower part of the city, on the seafront).

These elements, mentioned in a letter from the captain himself, were designed to protect the port and make it difficult to disembark.

The location of these first defences in Salvador is still the subject of much controversy, although it has been explored by illustrious figures in Bahian historiography.

It is generally accepted that six defences supported the rammed earth wall that surrounded the new city at the time of its foundation.

This number is based in part on references by Gabriel Soares de Sousa, which we believe to be fairly reliable.

However, he does not give the names of all the artillery positions.

The two sea forts that Luís Dias mentions verbatim in one of his letters were built on the beach to defend the port.

The author reports that the first of them was made of earth and mangrove sticks, which grow in the water and are like iron, which he thought could last about twenty years, leaving it to the royal discretion to build them of stone and lime.

Historians disagree about the exact location of these lost defences.

However, according to almost all the scholars who have read Dias’ document, one of them was located in the Ribeira do Góes, on a rock.

As for the other fort, it is known that it was called Santa Cruz and that it must have been smaller because of its weaponry.

The engineer and geographer Teodoro Sampaio (1855-1937), a scholar of the city of Salvador, points to four bastions facing the land:

• The bastion of São Tomé, which protected the gate of Santa Luzia and the road to Vila Velha do Pereira, on the site of today’s Praça Castro Alves.
• A bastion “in acute form with flanks and faces advanced to the north-east”, next to a certain noble house, with an entrance door surmounted by coats of arms (possibly the Solar dos Sete Candeeiros, near the current building of the Institute of Architects, on Ladeira da Praça).
• A bastion at the end of Vassouras Street, later known as Mocotó Street.
• Finally, a bastion at the head of the depression where the church of Barroquinha stands. This position must correspond to the site of the old Guarani cinema, later called the Glauber Rocha cinema, in what is now Castro Alves Square.

As you can imagine, the location of the bastions is the subject of another great controversy. It goes back to Gabriel Soares de Sousa, who in 1585 said of the primitive walls: “Now there is no memory of where they were”; it is therefore very difficult to be sure of the location of anything.

Moreover, the plans of João Teixeira Albernaz I, which are part of the Livro que dá razão do Estado do Brasil, the basis of the historians’ arguments, are not cadastral plans, but plans for the citadel that Diogo Botelho requested.

These plans may have been drawn up differently, executed partially or not at all.

So we can’t use these plans to argue that the first gates to Santa Catarina were on the north side of Praça Tomé de Sousa, at the beginning of what is now Rua da Misericórdia.

But it is worth admitting the situation proposed for this early access as a possibility, because the arguments presented, even if they are not convincing, allow for different interpretations.

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4. The early towers

Nothing remains of the old capital’s primitive defensive towers – mostly rammed-earth structures that time has consigned to oblivion.

This is not only because rammed earth can be an ephemeral construction technique if it is not carried out with a certain degree of care, but also because these fortifications have become obsolete in the evolution of the art of defence.

Fortunately, there are still written testimonies and iconographic elements that allow us to recover something of the memory of this primitive moment in our fortified systems.

Everything indicates that the tower, with its medieval foundations, played an important role in the design of fortifications in Portuguese America throughout most of the 16th century, both under the regime of hereditary captains and during the first moment when it was decided to create the city of Salvador.

First of all, it should be pointed out that this concept of the construction of our towers has been overlooked by some historians, who believe that the meaning of the term tower is linked to the symbolic concept of fortification in general. The reason for this misconception is that they haven’t carried out any research, combining the historical information contained in the texts and the state of the art of defence in Portugal, with the support of field observations made possible by archaeological surveys.

The first argument that can be made in favour of the existence of towers is that in the 16th century Portugal still retained medieval customs and traditions.

At that time, the tower was the centrepiece of any fortified system, and was even an isolated and solitary structure if the lord of the manor was not wealthy enough to surround it with a perimeter wall.

This system was sufficient to protect the first settlers against the rudimentary weapons of the original inhabitants of our land.

Next, the word tower appears in ancient documents and royal decrees, and there is no reason to believe that the term was used in a figurative sense, especially after the discovery of the iconography and remains of the Tower of Santiago in Agua de Meninos.

It’s true that the artists who made the engravings took poetic licence by placing towers everywhere.

However, if the drawing was made for documentary rather than illustrative purposes, the representation of the fortresses was closer to the real thing.

So it’s not unlikely that the first defence towers with a square base were the fortifications used by the lords of the manor in their captainships.

The historians Francisco Varnhagen and Capistrano de Abreu come to our rescue with a transcription of a document from the National Library in Rio de Janeiro, in which Francisco Pereira Coutinho, the donor of the captaincy of Bahia, explains the appearance of Vila Velha: “He placed the village on the best site he could find, where he built houses for a hundred inhabitants, with locks all around and a tower on the first floor”.

Pereira Coutinho’s tower in Vila Velha (where the church of Santo Antônio is located) must have been similar in every way to that of Duarte Coelho in Pernambuco, which, according to Varnhagen, was “a kind of square castle, like the keep towers of medieval manor houses”.

It’s not difficult to see, on the plan of the primitive fort of Santo Alberto, in the lower left-hand corner of the iconography left to us by Albernaz, the design of these square towers, whose entrance was flanked by two smaller corner towers.

It should be noted, for example, that Pereira Coutinho’s, in Vila Velha, was already in need of repair when the city was founded, as evidenced by a provision of the time for the reconstruction of 31 fathoms (68.2 metres) of its rammed earth by the taipeiro Balthazar Fernandes.

A variant of the old rectangular towers was the use of a circular design, with the entrance also flanked by smaller towers. An example of this version can be seen in the upper left corner of Albernaz’s drawing (p. 44). As the records of the military engineer José Antônio Caldas and the chronicler Luís dos Santos Vilhena show, this tower survived until the end of the 18th century, when it was incorporated into the additional embankment designed by Field Master Miguel Pereira da Costa in the first quarter of that century.

It was the tower of São Tiago de Água de Meninos, later the Fort of Santo Alberto (when the original one disappeared), commonly known as Fortim da Lagartixa.

Less than fifty years after the founding of the capital, the Portuguese colonists felt that these defensive systems had become ineffective in stopping an organised force and withstanding the punishment of large calibre artillery.

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5. The state of the city’s defences

A few years after Gabriel Soares described the appalling state of Salvador’s defences, D. Francisco de Sousa arrived in the city to take charge of the large overseas colony. Brother Vicente do Salvador, a 17th-century historian and chronicler from Bahia, says that D. Francisco was “the most popular governor that ever existed in Brazil”.

From 1591 to 1602, he exercised his authority with gentleness, became very friendly with the population and worked to improve the local defences, according to the chronicler.

The new governor-general was accompanied by technicians, including the military engineer Baccio de Filicaia, who may have designed the fortifications built during this period.

Frar Vicente do Salvador reports that Don Francisco “built three or four fortresses of stone and mortar”. The number four is probably correct, as the buildings are understood to be the fortress of Santo Antônio da Barra, the fortress of Itapagipe (Monserrate), the fort of Água de Meninos (Lagartixa) and the redoubt of Santo Alberto (Church of the Holy Body), as well as new rammed earth walls for the city.

More important than Diogo Moreno’s Livro que dá razão do Estado do Brasil in explaining this moment in history is the report written by the same author in 1609, which describes the location of the fortified positions. As the purpose of the document was not to list defensive points but artillery, the simplest platforms, armed only when necessary, were not mentioned, as there were few pieces available and/or to avoid leaving them in the open.

1609 Report on fortified positions in Salvador

The 1609 report describes the fortified positions in Salvador, detailing the buildings and their locations. Most of the fortifications faced the sea, except for the two gates to the north and south. Here is a summary of the positions mentioned:

The report of 1609 mentions the following fortified positions, most of them facing the sea, except for the two gates to the north and south:

• Santo Antônio, at the entrance to the Bar, at letter A, which was built to defend it […].
• At the entrance to the city, at the gate of Saint Lucy, there is an instance above the same gate […].
• [Above the Church of the Conception there was another instance with two bronze pieces.
• In the middle of the mountain, under the Casa da Misericórdia, there is also a platform that defends the slope at the point near the city […].
• […] At its foot (Estância da Santa Casa), so that it can throw (water?) on the fire, is Santo Alberto, an estancia of stone and lime built by Dom Francisco de Souza […].
• […] at the foot of the Colégio de Jesus is another very high platform that overlooks the whole harbour and (illegible) down to the children’s water […].
• […] at the last door that leads to the Carmo, there is another cubelo that defends this entrance […].
• […] On the town beach, at the end of the ditches on the side of the old landfill, there’s an estancia […].
• […] Further along [also on the beach], in the houses of Baltazar Ferraz, there are two pieces […].
• […] Further along the beach are two more bronze falcons […].
• To the north of this town, one league away, is another point called Itapagipe, marked with the letter G on the map, from where there is another stone and lime fort of the same design as S. Antônio (da Barra).
• […] in another place between Itapagipe and the city, which they call Água dos Meninos […].

According to Teodoro Sampaio, as well as building the four fortifications mentioned above, D. Francisco de Souza began work on “the Fort of St Bartholomew at Ponta de Itapagipe, designed to close off the entrance to the mouth of the Pirajá River”.

This site was close to what is now the São Bartolomeu Park, the toponym of which is derived from the name of the fort.

Master Teodoro was very inquisitive and must have taken this information from some document, but he doesn’t say whether he had access to a primary source that would clarify the matter.

The typology of the São Bartolomeu fort (a star-shaped polygon) also seems strange in relation to other drawings of the time. This does not justify an absolute rejection of Teodoro Sampaio’s statement, since the known drawing could have been the result of later alterations.

This is what happened to other fortresses, such as Barbalho, Santo Antônio Além-do-Carmo and the present Santo Alberto, which changed their physiognomy, or Santo Antônio da Barra, which was completely transformed several times.

It is the same Teodoro Sampaio who claims that it was Diogo Botelho, successor of D. Francisco de Sousa, who was responsible for the Fort of São Marcelo.

This is a point on which we cannot agree, but it is widely accepted by several historians.

The engraving below, by the Dutch cartographer Hessel Gerritsz, is very revealing for its unusual fidelity to the elements of the defence of the city of Salvador, shortly after the invasion of 1624.

As has already been pointed out, in most cases the artist’s poetic licence added a degree of fantasy to reality.

In Gerritsz’s drawing, however, the artillery positions are indicated by cannon smoke and often by the inscription of the word “fort” or “battery” in Dutch, often corresponding to Diogo Moreno‘s description.

The drawing of Forte da Laje, then known as Forte Novo (New Fort), shows the actual configuration of the defence. It shows the fort above the hermitage of the Conceição, the fort of São Diogo, below the Misericórdia, the stone and mortar fort of Santo Alberto and the very high platform at the foot of the Colégio de Jesus, which must have been the pottery of the priests of the Company (potte backery), from where you could see as far as the Água dos Meninos.

As for the office of the “banda do vazadouro velho”, it could be the one indicated in the Guindaste dos Padres (Papenhooft), which was the name of the lift that took goods from the Cidade Baixa, the port area, to the Colégio da Companhia de Jesus.

Of the positions shown, only three do not appear in Diogo Moreno‘s references: the Conceição battery, well known to scholars; the Palácio battery, also well known and commented on for its uselessness; and a platform in Carmo, which could be that of the time of D. Fradique de Tolledo, commander of the expedition organised by Portugal and Spain to liberate Salvador from the Dutch in 1625.

It really is a very interesting piece of iconography for those studying the fortifications of Salvador.

See History of the forts and lighthouses of Salvador.

History of the forts and defences of Salvador de Bahia

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