Somewhere south of Salvador, the coconut palms stop and the dendê palms begin.
Here is that coast, read as an organism rather than an itinerary.
The north: sand, restinga, and the turtles that come back
Todos os Santos: the bay that made the city
Salvador does not sit on the ocean. It sits on the mouth of an enormous bay, the largest in Brazil, and the bay is why the city is where it is.
Do this on a weekday if you can. The bay is where Salvador goes on Sundays.
Costa do Dendê: palm oil, mangroves, and pools that appear twice a day
South of the bay the geography complicates beautifully. The coast breaks into islands, estuaries, and a peninsula, and the forest comes right down to the sand.
Three places carry this stretch:
Costa do Cacau: the forest that is also a farm
Then the palms give way to something stranger, and in conservation terms, more important.
Itacaré itself sits where the Rio de Contas meets the sea, with a run of beaches — Itacarezinho, Engenhoca, Havaízinho — reached by trails through the forest, and enough swell to have made it a surf town.
Costa do Descobrimento: rivers, reef, and the oldest forest on the coast
Further south the land flattens again into a coastal plain of tabuleiros, low cliffs of coloured clay, and rivers that run brown out of the interior and meet the sea in broad shallow mouths.
Costa das Baleias: the reef at the bottom
The last stretch is the least visited and, ecologically, the most extraordinary thing Bahia has.
The five islands of the archipelago are seabird colonies — brown boobies, frigatebirds — and the surrounding reefs feed green and hawksbill turtles.
The whole thing
The temptation with a coast this long is to rank it — best beach, best village, best water. It resists that, and the reason is the point.
You can drive most of it in a fortnight. You would be better off taking a third of it and looking closely.
