Candomble's terreiros layer West African tradition and Catholic imagery so closely that a single altar can honour an orixa and a Catholic saint as effectively the same figure approached from two directions.
Orixas behind saints' faces
Candomble developed largely from Yoruba, Fon and Central African religious traditions carried by enslaved people to Brazil, and under conditions of suppression, practitioners frequently associated specific orixas, deities such as Iemanja, Ogum and Xango, with corresponding Catholic saints, allowing devotion to continue under a Catholic surface presentation even where the underlying practice remained substantially African in structure and belief.
The oldest terreiro, by most accounts
Ile Axe Iya Nasso Oka, generally regarded as the oldest continuously operating terreiro in Salvador, was founded in the early nineteenth century and has served as a reference point of religious authority and lineage for numerous other terreiros established afterward, giving it outsized influence relative to its individual size within Bahia's wider Candomble community.
As this entry's companion article covers
The requirement, in force until as late as 1976, that terreiros obtain police permits to legally operate, a decades-long formal mechanism of state surveillance and discrimination against Afro-Brazilian religious practice, is addressed directly in this entry's companion article rather than repeated here.