Where does the word favela come from?

A plant before a place

Before it meant a neighborhood, favela was the name of a plant. It grows in the caatinga, the dry thorn scrub of Brazil’s Northeast, and it burns the skin of anyone who brushes against it. The sources do not even agree on its exact botanical species. Near Canudos, in the backlands of Bahia, a hill covered in it rose in front of the town, and it took the plant’s name: the Morro da Favela, Favela Hill.

The hill where an army was trapped

In 1897 Canudos, which its own people called Belo Monte, was under attack by the army of Brazil’s young Republic, the story told in What was the War of Canudos?. On June 27, the first column of the fourth expedition reached Favela Hill. It was a fine place to shell the town from, and the most feared gun, a Whitworth 32 nicknamed the Matadeira, “the Killer,” fired from there.

But for weeks it was the army that was besieged. Supply trains could not get through the scrub, the troops went hungry under fire, and the wounded ran into the hundreds. Only in August and September, after the Minister of War came to Bahia to organize supplies, did food, mules and reinforcements arrive. The soldiers did not forget the name.

From the backlands to Rio

The war ended on October 5, 1897. Many soldiers returned to Rio de Janeiro, then the nation’s capital, with nowhere to live. They climbed the Providência hill, right beside the War Ministry in the center of the city, and put up shacks of wood and zinc. They named the place after the hill at Canudos: Morro da Favela.

The name stuck, and then it spread. Over the following decades favela stopped being the name of one hill and became the word for any informal settlement of the poor, first in Rio and then across the country. Providência is still often called Rio’s first favela.

The hill that got its old name back

Here is the twist. The word won, but the hill lost it. The slope beside the War Ministry is known again by its earlier name, Morro da Providência, while “favela” went on to name thousands of other places. Portuguese built a family of words on it: favelado for a person who lives in one, and favelização for the spread of such settlements in a growing city.

A word English kept

English borrowed the word as it is, without translating it, and it now sits in English dictionaries. So whenever someone says favela, in Portuguese or in English, they are repeating, mostly without knowing it, the name of a stinging plant on a hill where an army went hungry in the backlands of Bahia. The cost of that war on the other side of the hill is in How many people died in the War of Canudos?.