This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Brazil gathers two cities whose religious character was made by what arrived from outside them, one by a statue pulled from a river and the other by the people carried across an ocean.
Aparecida grew from a single find: three fishermen recovered a small terracotta statue of the Immaculate Conception from the Paraiba do Sul River in 1717, broken and blackened, now venerated across the country as Nossa Senhora Aparecida, meaning literally the one who appeared. A chapel went up on a nearby hill within decades, and the growing stream of pilgrims eventually outgrew the town's status as a district of neighboring Guaratingueta, so Aparecida became its own municipality in 1928. The Basilica built to hold the statue now draws seven to eight million pilgrims a year, more visitors annually than the city has residents.
Salvador da Bahia was the first capital of colonial Brazil and the main port of its slave trade, and it is the city where Candomble took form as enslaved Yoruba, Fon and Bantu people organized their traditions into initiatory houses under Catholic cover. Its oldest surviving terreiros were founded in the nineteenth century, and the Church of Bonfim, whose steps are washed each January in a rite that is Catholic and Candomble at once, is the clearest public expression of that double belonging. The city holds more churches than almost any other in the Americas alongside the largest concentration of Afro-Brazilian religious houses.
One city's devotion arrived by river and stayed put; the other's arrived by ship and was rebuilt into something new.