Terreiro de Jesus

For about thirty years now, the capoeira group led by José Milton Pereira dos Santos has had a regular spot at Terreiro de Jesus. Performances, lessons, and workshops take place here. The group’s name repeats the square’s old name, although officially it is called Praça Quinze de Novembro.

Here, the word “terreiro” means an open courtyard in front of a large building. In the early fifteen fifties, that building became the Jesuit College of the Society of Jesus. Manuel da Nóbrega, the head of the first Jesuit mission, intended to train future priests here and convert the Indigenous population to Catholicism.

It all began with a house and a chapel made of clay and straw. The chapel soon began to fall apart. Nóbrega wrote to his superiors that the few residents of the new colony were poor, asked the Crown for money, and explicitly demanded that enslaved workers be sent. That was the material foundation of the future college: donations, royal support, and forced labor. An open space was left in front of its church, and the townspeople began to call it the courtyard of the Society of Jesus—Terreiro de Jesus.

In seventeen fifty-nine, the Portuguese Crown expelled the Jesuits from its possessions, took the priests away, and seized their property. The college was converted into the Royal Military Hospital. That very conversion determined the next turn in its fate.

In January eighteen oh eight, Prince Regent João, the future King João VI, arrived in Salvador. The Portuguese court was fleeing across the Atlantic Ocean from Napoleon’s army. José Correia Picanço came with him—the chief court surgeon, who was pressing for surgeons to be trained in Brazil itself. The son of a barber-surgeon, he began in military service, taught anatomy, and rose to the court through his craft; that was why, on the journey, he could speak to the prince on behalf of the profession.

Picanço proposed opening a school in the hospital that occupied the former Jesuit College. On February eighteenth, eighteen oh eight, while the court was still in Salvador, João ordered the School of Surgery of Bahia to be established here. Picanço was tasked with selecting teachers of surgery, anatomy, and obstetrics.

The school had no separate teaching building. Twice a week, one of the hospital wards was given over to practical classes: future surgeons studied beside patients. Thirty-six days later, the court left Salvador, Picanço left with it, and the school remained. In eighteen thirty-two, it became the Faculty of Medicine of Bahia.

The old college is gone now: the present building of the Faculty of Medicine of Bahia occupies its site, and inside it, parts of Jesuit structures found by archaeologists are preserved. Of the former complex, the church remains above ground; it became the Cathedral Basilica of Salvador. The Jesuits were taken away from here, the court surgeon went on to Rio de Janeiro, and capoeiristas still say their shared address: Terreiro de Jesus.