Pelourinho (Salvador da Bahia), UNESCO, and the Production of an Afro-Brazilian Past, 1965–75

This paper looks at Bahia state tourism development from the late 1960s to the late 1970s and pays particular attention to Salvador da Bahia and the creation of the colonial city center Pelourinho-Maciel as an UNESCO World Heritage Site (1965-1985).  Given these years of UNESCO involvement also are the last fifteen years of the dictatorship, I argue tourism development and UNESCO acknowledgment played a key role in the regime's negotiations and transition to democracy. While Industrialization was envisioned as the key strategy for providing employment for the poor that would then lead to a self-financing economic growth, a regional Bahian tourism industry was also a conceived during this period and had a large impact for greater inter-regional integration in addition to promoting international tourism through UNESCO initiated initiatives.

Equally important to local, state and international economic strategists were international urban planners making recommendations on behalf of UNESCO and the potential for a particular place to become an UNESCO World Heritage site. One such document is Graeme Shankland’s 1969 UNESCO report.  I argue the images from the 1969 UNESCO report played a determining role in justifying Pelourinho-Maciel a site worthy of the UNESCO decree based on its Afro-Brazilian past. Individually and collectively, the images work to construct visual proof supporting Shankland’s narrative claims including the potential for international tourism development. The images thus provide evidence for the potential touristic pleasure by offering the viewer images visually structured to take on a qualitative scrutiny akin to John Urry’s “tourist gaze” (2002). The forming of realist modes of depiction as produced through the images included in the 1969 UNESCO report helped to create a hierarchy of credibility and fact setting particular to the process of making Pelourinho-Maciel legible to city, state and foreign UNESCO managers.