What was the first capital of Brazil?

Why Brazil needed a capital

For half a century after Portuguese ships first reached it in 1500, Brazil had no capital because it had no government. The Crown sent ships to load brazilwood, the red dye wood that gave the country its name, and from 1534 it handed the coast to private lords who were supposed to settle it at their own cost, the hereditary captaincies. Nearly all of them failed. In 1548 King João III of Portugal changed course and created a governor-general, a royal official over the whole colony. He needed a seat.

Why Bahia

The royal regimento, the written orders Tomé de Sousa carried, signed on December 17, 1548, told him to build a fortress and a town in Bahia. The choice made sense. The Bay of All Saints is a vast sheltered harbor near the middle of the long coast. The captaincy of Bahia had failed, so it was back in royal hands. And a Portuguese man had lived on that bay for decades: Diogo Álvares, a castaway the Tupinambá called Caramuru, married to a Tupinambá woman, Paraguaçu. He helped the new governor settle in.

A thousand people and six Jesuits

Tomé de Sousa was a nobleman and a soldier who had fought in Morocco and served in India. He arrived on March 29, 1549, with about a thousand people. With him came Brazil’s first Jesuits, six of them, led by Manuel da Nóbrega. The town went up on top of a steep escarpment over the bay, easy to defend, with the harbor below. That two-level plan is still there: the Upper City and the Lower City, linked today by the Lacerda Elevator, a public lift that is one of Salvador’s landmarks.

He governed until 1553 and went home to Portugal. The city stayed.

Why the capital moved

Salvador remained the head of the colony until 1763, when the seat moved to Rio de Janeiro. The colony’s center of gravity had shifted south. Gold had been found in Minas Gerais in the 1690s, and in the 1700s it reached the sea, and Lisbon, through the port of Rio. The south was also where Portugal fought Spain over borders.

Salvador had one more moment on center stage. In January 1808, fleeing Napoleon, the Portuguese royal family landed first in Bahia, and it was in Salvador, on January 28, that Prince Regent João opened Brazil’s ports to friendly nations. Then he sailed on to Rio. His story is in Who was Dom João VI?.

So Brazil has had three capitals: Salvador from 1549 to 1763, Rio de Janeiro from 1763 to 1960, and Brasília since April 21, 1960. Why the last move happened is in Why did Brazil move its capital to Brasília?.