Monuments built by slaves.

Quilombos.

Cachoiera.

The Atlantic forest.

The Reconcavo.

Camamu.

All these are part of Salvador Brazil and the area around All Saints Bay.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman, was provided by Agnese Haury.

♪ music ♪ Brazil is a very large country.

Land wise it's bigger than the continental United States, it has almost 200 million people.

The city of Salvador is the third largest, it has over 4 million people.

It's right up there with Chicago.

Descendants from Africa constitute most of the population of Salvador and the communities around the Baía de Todos os Santos, All Saints Bay.

They still maintain a strong cultural link to their African roots.

One of Salvador's best known monuments is an elevator.

The Lacerda elevator which connects the Cidade Alta, the upper city with the Cidade Baixa, the lower city.

The lower city was where the workers lived who unloaded the ships and had to bring those goods up the steep cliffs to the wealthy people who lived up here.

About 100 years ago somebody decided that installing an elevator would save a lot of time and money and that's the structure that's there today.

It's a very popular place.

Not far from the base of the elevator is another popular monument.

This is the Mercado Modelo.

It used to be a customs house when Brazil still had a monarch back in the 19th century.

Sometime afterwards it was converted to a municipal market, burned down several times and today it is an arts and crafts market, extremely popular with tourists.

Especially, Brazilian tourists.

It's intoxicating to walk into a building and hear Brazilian music, which is about the best in the world.

The vendors are smart.

They have good musicians playing them, so tourists have to buy.

As I walk down here, I see stuff that I see in houses everywhere but somehow it reflects a lot of the culture of Bahia and especially of Salvador.

Popular monuments show up in unusual places.

This is an urban park in the middle of the city of Salvador.

It's called the Dique do Torroro, the statues here on the lake are actually representations of deities called "Orishas."

Each of these deities represents a natural force such as earth, air, fire and water.

They are mostly of Angolan origin but play a very important role in many of the people of Bahia today.

African Brazilian traditions stress the importance of priestesses and priests who are believed to be connected to higher powers called "Orishas."

Their religion known as candomblé teaches that all humans are guided by at least one orisha.

The priestesses are known as Mãe-de-santos.

I've located one who is going to determine which orisha guides me on my own life journey.

She uses seashells as a medium for interpretation.

And she informs me that Yemanja, the goddess of sea and intellect, is the guiding force in my life.

African Brazilians who subscribe to candomblé see no conflict with Catholicism.

The Candomblé participants agree to suspend all their activities during Holy Week.

The traditional African portion of all the ceremonies disappears.

It's on hold.

After Easter, it'll come back strong.

In Bahia, religion and monuments are interconnected in complicated ways.

As historian Ana Paula Camargo, explains.

(Portuguese) This procession here ends up in front of Saint Anthony Church.

It is part of the Holy Week ceremony, a religious event of the Catholic church.

This procession is a meeting of two groups.

In the first group, Jesus Christ bears the cross, as his image is paraded from the church of Bakayom to the church of San Antonio.

The second parade is led by the image of the virgin Mary and begins at the church of Fifteen Mysteries, quinze mistérios.

The two groups meet in front of San Antonio.

(Portuguese) This wood instrument is called a matraka and is used to alert the faithful, that the Christ statue is passing by.

It is only used during Holy Week.

(Portuguese) Bahia is many things, including architectural monuments that preserve the history of this great city and country.

The city of Salvador is home to many of these monuments, but some of the most notable remainders of the past lie across the bay.

(Portuguese) One of the greatest monuments is the convent of San Francisco located on the Iguape Bay, a secondary bay within the greater All Saints Bay, Baía de Todos os Santos.

It was built by the San Franciscans and unfortunately is a monument going through an accelerated process of decay.

It is a beautiful convent building, now surrounded by a modest fishing village.

This and all other monuments were only possible because of slave labor.

Slaves planted and harvested the vast plantations of sugar cane in the Cachoeira region.

Some of the slaves escaped and formed their own hidden communities called quilombos.

On our way to Cachoeira, we hope to get a glimpse of these century old settlements.

This whole valley here is full of quilombos.

Each one of them has their own stories and I've never tried to venture into one before, but here I go.

(Portuguese) We live here within a basin here right above Buraco, the hole.

(Portuguese) We are one of ten or so quilombola communities.

We were all born and raised here.

This is an especially happy time because it's the Saturday before Easter and other the custom opposed by the Catholic church they were not allowed to eat meat during Lent.

Tomorrow they can eat meat so they are going to feast on pork and fresh beef.

(Portuguese) We raise the animals that the local butcher buys.

He kills and cuts up the meat and then we buy it back from him.

Tradition allows us to eat meat at 12 noon.

This is a large family unit here in this community.

It's made up of twenty five families.

The elders say that over there is a tree trunk, where the slaves were caught and then whipped.

The freed slaves in the quilombola harvested honey, planted cacaba, beans and bananas.

We're here at the end of the dry season and the level of the lake is pretty low, but it's enough to provide water for washing clothes.

It's very hard work, but it's a very important part of women's lives.

They get to catch up with what's happening with everybody.

At the same time, just a few feet downstream, they are cleaning the less meaty parts of the freshly cut up cow and pig.

This sort of degraded pasture was once covered with tropical rainforest.

It's been cleared off, but one tree is here and it is not a tree native here.

It came from Africa probably brought here by slaves intentionally or perhaps unintentionally through some other creatures, bats or something that got on the boat.

It's known throughout the region, it's called Grujana.

The town of Cachoiera lies 20 miles upstream from the bay.

An hour by car and half a day by burro.

Across the river is a great place to get photographs from.

There's not anywhere much better to see.

When you're walking around the streets, you get the feel that you're in a 18th century, 19th century town.

There are automobiles, yeah, but there are all kinds of donkeys, horses, mules carrying things mixed in with the traffic and everybody knows everybody else.

You have the feel of a small town, but this colonial architecture turns it into a magical place all of its own.

This little city is the most important in the area known as the Reconcavo.

The sort of moon shaped west shore of the bay.

The Reconcavo was and to some extent still is the source of the food, the raw materials that made Salvador a very wealthy city.

Historically, very important for Brazil, it's got a fresh water port.

Ships could sail up the river using a title boar, anchor here and gather fresh water and go downstream with the help of the tide.

Because of those advantages, it became a perfect place for Portuguese settlers to begin.

Cachoiera was also the location of the first real battle for independence back in 1822 or so where the local people stood up against the Portuguese.

The most important event in the history of the city appears to have been the large bridge built in the late 19th century when Brazil still had a king.

It connects the city of Sanfelice across the river with Cachoeira.

South of Cachoeira the coast becomes a series of estuaries, mangrove swamps, small islands and bays.

They are the best on the east coast of South America, maybe all of South America.

They were ideally located for slave trade.

An unending cascade of slaves arrived here from Africa, which is not too far away.

What makes these bays like Camamu so important is that they are mangrove lined and mangroves are the source of almost all marine life.

Inland, lay the great Atlantic forest.

That Atlantic forest and these unending mangroves are ideal places for slaves to hide.

It's fun to talk to an old timer whose seen the Camamu bay area change from a sleepy, little fishing town with almost no work to a kind of buzzing tourist place that it is now.

(Portuguese) There is over 400 years of history here.

The locals fish from the sea and harvested vegetables from their fields.

Today no one wants that lifestyle.

My grandfather had a few cows on a small farm with dendê trees to make palm oil.

In those days, I rode a canoe.

There weren't any motorboats like this one.

Only in the last forty years did boat motors arrive here.

We used to sail from here all the way to Salvador without any motors only sails, powered by the wind.

Camamu bay is dotted with islands.

Historically, people were pretty much self-subsistent.

They still have these marvelous fishing nets so they still do catch fish here and they planted just about every possible fruit tree they could.

This is an orange tree and if I look up here I see star fruit.

Some of the citrus has the most vicious thorns.

I would not want to shimmy up that branch right there.

These people have growing in their yard, believe it or not, a coco tree, cacao and these are how the coco beans grow.

This is a fruit and as it matures it will get bigger and then turn dark and inside are the actual coco beans.

So this is a fruit, I've never seen before.

They call it bête bête.

They say it's a relative of a lime, it's not.

Quite beautiful flowers, but they tell me and I'll trust them, that it tastes like a lime so I'll let you know.

Yes it's very sour, it's actually kind of tasty sour, but it does have a real limey taste, but it's a different family.

Trust me, this is not a lime.

One of the wonders of Bahia is the crab feed lot.

Something I've never seen before.

These are terrestrial crabs, fiddler crabs and to fatten them up and make them good eating, they raise them in a cage and they feed them.

They feed them, in this case, corn.

They capture them very carefully because the fiddler crabs can inflict pretty good bites so I've been instructed how to hold on to it and I'm going to be very careful.

Folks here have come to rely on tourism, but they still rely on the sea.

These fish have been set out here to dry, salted and dry in the sun and buyers come by and they will sell them in the markets in the cities.

So these dugouts here are not actually made locally, they're purchased from Tubarão.

(Portuguese) If you get a good log of this wood, the boat you make will last thirty to forty years and I can believe it, but I don't know how it can float.

It is so heavy.

This is not hallow wood.

This is heavy stuff.

I can barely budge it.

It is beautifully finished inside.

(Portuguese) So they pull in three or four different varieties of fish, pretty much all year round.

Right now it's not lobster season, so they'll have to wait for another time for that.

This boat and many, many others like it are locally built right in this village.

The wood originally all came from here and from the local forest, but now the basic frame is built from a cut down fruit tree and the deck is made of wood that comes from the Amazon basin, clandestinely.

The tradition here goes back a long time from grandfather to father to son.

The boat builders have been in this village for generations.

Much of that forest, one of the world's natural wonders was felled for lumber or cleared to plant a special kind of tree.

I always associate the history of rubber with the Amazon.

How does that affect this right here?

Well, the rubber trees is indigenous to the Amazon itself.

It's not an Atlantic forest tree.

So what you had here is you had Firestone were growing rubber in the Amazon and it was a big failure because of the fungus that attacks the leaves when you plant rubber in monocultures.

Well, they thought they would escape by coming to the Atlantic forest.

So they bought this property in the '50's to be able to do just that, but the fungus came along with the equipment and everything else.

Oh my goodness, yeah.

And now the Atlantic forest is infected with this.

But when Michelin bought the property in the early '80's, they started a project in 1991 to try to figure out ways to combat the fungus, to develop clones of the rubber that would be partially resistant and at the same time still productive.

The rubber tree is a native of the Amazon basin and the original rubber gathers gathered from wild trees.

In the 20th century, it became domesticated and grew very, very well in the state of Bahia.

To harvest the rubber, the workers start slashing the trees in a very skilled fashion, making a diagonal slice in a channel and the white latex runs down this channel and drips into a little spout and then into this cup and then every once in a while the workers come by and they harvest the latex which is dried out, out of the cup.

It actually has a rubbery texture when they take it out.

It's got a long way to go before it becomes a tire.

The owner of the rubber trees is Michelin tire company.

One of their current missions is to preserve the Atlantic Forest, what's left of it.

My guide is ecologist Kevin Flesher.

He claims he's only 6 ft 6 inches tall.

So how big is this preserve that we're walking in?

The reserve here is 3,100 hectors.

So we actually have much more than we are required to have by law.

It's a company policy of good land stewardship.

They understood that if they abandoned this land that it would probably be destroyed by anybody else who took it over, which is happening here in the region.

In Brazil, in the Atlantic forest, the law stipulates that every landowner must preserve 20% of their land in native vegetation.

So if I have a stream, a small stream, a rivulet going through my property, I have to.. oh I'll follow you.

.

addition to the 20% of the forest.

Yes, it depends on the size of the stream or the water source, but it will depend on how wide the gallery forest has to be.

This is the Cachoiera Pancada Grande.

The big hit waterfall.

It is the largest on the coast of all of the state of Bahia.

Right now, local people tell me that the water level is pretty low.

There's a hydro-electric dam about 15 kilometers upstream that's removing a lot of water.

I guess it's a dry time.

You wouldn't believe it by me, but I would love to see this when it's really crashing.

I've heard a lot about the diversity of the Atlantic forest, how many species of trees would we find in this area?

In the reserve itself, we've cataloged over 400 species so far, which would be normal for a forest in southern Bahia.

I suppose if you were to go to the Eastern United States you'd find 15.

Right and in the richest forest, in the Smokies, I think you have the richest forest in the Eastern coast, but yeah it would be something like that.

I don't know whether to look up or down cause it's got to be about 30 meters high, 100ft or so?

Yeah, exactly.

The canopy here generally, is between 20 and 30 meters.

The tallest trees we've measured have been 46 meters in the more mature parts of the forest.

My goodness.

So that's 130, 140 feet.

It would be something like that.

Yeah, exactly.

I keep tripping on roots that are sticking out, so why do so many of these trees have these roots that start here and then boom?

In terms of the lateral root spread, it's so that the trees can get the nutrition from the soil because the nutrition leachesfrom the organic part, where all the leaf litter is.

If you go deeper, the soils are more sterile.

This is a common occurrence in tropical forests.

This is a termite mound and it is really dense, but I can break off a little piece and I shouldn't have much hazard, but we can see how this is just full of termite tunnels.

It's a vital part of the function of the ecosystem here.

Termites eat wood and they turn it into nutrients.

The forest has been heavily disturbed, there's no doubt about it, but what you see happening out in the Atlantic forest, the diversity is still here.

And also what we've been through an enrichment planting outside of the forest, that it's possible to restore Atlantic forest.

It's expensive and it's time consuming, but it's possible and if you protect the forest, what you end up seeing is that the fauna comes back really quickly.

Well if we were to take a piece of pasture and there's plenty of that around.

If we were to leave that alone, will the forest come back?

Up to 90% of the tree species are dependent on animals for seed dispersal.

So if they get rid of all the mammals, there's nothing to move the seeds around.

The forest stops essentially.

The processes that maintain the forest stop.

So you cant have a healthy forest without healthy mammals in it?

No, not at all and birds as well of course.

That's why you have to protect the forest from hunting.

It becomes the principle conservation activity is actually protecting the forest.

Most of the great, old trees in the Atlantic forest got cut down over the last few centuries.

This one made it.

It's probably between 100-125 feet tall, maybe taller than that.

It's not at all a stretch to think that it's at least 1,000 years old.

Its fruit is unlike any I've ever seen.

This thing ways at least five pounds.

It's as hard as a rock, you can imagine it dropping out of the tree.

When it ripens, boom this drops out and the seeds with the fruits on them are in a spiral inside here.

Monkeys grab the seeds, go off and eat them in another tree.

Bats grab the seeds, fly off to another tree.

That's how it gets dispersed.

That's why we have babies.

Not enough of them.

This is a sacred tree.

If you look around you see it is by far the largest tree around.

There never was any tree of this size in recent memory.

Probably, this was protected by Indians, long before Europeans ever got here.

It's a very special tree in a very special place.

From the splendid Atlantic forest, to the exploding metropolitan area of Salvador, we are constantly reminded of two things, that Bahia is truly a tropical place and that African Brazilians and their heritage are a dominant presence.

Colombia has a mixed reputation internationally, but nearly everyone agrees that its coffee is world class.

For millions of Colombians, from the capital of Bogota, to the rural Eje Cafetero.

Coffee is a way of life.

Join us next time In the Americas , with me, David Yetman.

[music] Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman , was provided by Agnese Haury.

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