A fresh breeze blows in Bahia.

• Author: Dunn, Christopher
• Position: Restoration project for colonial buildings in Bahia's historic Pelourinho district in Brazil

An innovative state-sponsored restoration project in the historic district of Pelourinho is saving the New World's largest collection of colonial buildings

Sad Bahia, oh how dissimilar

You are, and I am from our former state

Poor I see you, you see me in debt

Rich I've seen you before, you've seen me abundant.

Gregorio de Matos, the great Brazilian satiric poet, wrote these lines about his native city in the late seventeenth century. Three hundred years later, the poet might have had even more tragic words for Salvador, Bahia, the first colonial capital of Portuguese territories in Brazil. Matos's old haunts in and around the Pelourinho district of the historic center had become a collection of decaying colonial buildings, and home to a destitute and transient population. For most of the twentieth century, Pelourinho recalled the "Triste Bahia" evoked by the Baroque poet. In his time, Matos had denounced the region's dependency on a declining plantation economy, the misery of African slaves brought to toil there, the avarice and corruption of Portuguese colonials, and the hypocrisy of the Catholic church. The Pelourinho of the 1980s was a run-down, neglected place with a bad reputation as the site of drug-dealing, prostitution, and petty theft.

All of this has recently changed thanks to the perseverance of local grass-roots social and cultural groups, a massive state-sponsored project to reconstruct the area, and the influx of businesses seeking to benefit from a booming tourist economy. In the last two years, Pelourinho has come a very long way toward regaining its former splendor. Elegant restaurants and cozy bars have replaced the dives and brothels. An empty lot was transformed into a quaint patio in front of the new "Shopping Pelo"--a mini-mall built into sobrados, which are Portuguese colonial-era villas. And, almost predictably, a once-abandoned corner building now houses Bahia's first Benetton shop. As I walked down Pelourinho's cobblestone streets last January, after a year's absence, Gregorio de Matos's words came to mind. Indeed, "how dissimilar" it all was from the decaying slum I used to know.

The restoration project began in 1991, under the aegis of the Institute of Artistic and Cultural Patrimony (known by its Portuguese acronym, IPAC). The state-funded agency, located in the famous seventeenth-century sobrado known as Solar do Ferrao, has been planning, drawing, and directly overseeing the physical and social transformations of the historic center. Along a high bluff overlooking the Bahia de Todos os Santos, the original urban settlement extended from the Terreiro de Jesus, a square surrounded by colonial cathedrals, down the cobblestone Ladeira do Pelourinho, and up again to the Convento do Carmo. The historic district also includes an adjacent residential neighborhood called Maciel. Pelourinho-Maciel is said to be the largest complex of colonial buildings in the Americas.

According to Telvina Fernandes, the acting coordinator of urban planning, over 50 percent of the buildings of Pelourinho-Maciel were in ruins when the project began. "The stigma was both social and physical. The houses were decayed. There was no sewage, sanitation, or water. The people who lived here took baths in the fountain of the Terreiro de Jesus."

The project provided much-needed infrastructure for the area. Underground cables and pipes now bring electrical, telephone, water, and sanitation services to the neighborhood. Fernandes claims that 344 buildings have been either restored or reconstructed during the first four of six stages. IPAC's team of professional architects and students from the Federal University of Bahia have been working overtime, drawing up plans, block by block, for a complete urban renewal. Relatively intact buildings have been restored and repainted, while the hollow shells, sometimes only facades, have been entirely reconstructed, mostly with reinforced concrete, using modern architectural...