Our columnist, Sebastian Modak, is visiting each destination on our 52 Places to Go in 2019 list. Before Salvador, his previous stop was Aberdeen, Scotland, where street art enlivened the walls.

For the first time in six months, I would have to rely on memory alone: No cameras allowed. In my packed section of male spectators (women were at the other end of the room), there wouldn’t have been enough space to lift my camera to my face even if I’d been allowed.

The pattering of long cylindrical atabaque drums, a sound like rainfall with occasional syncopated claps of thunder, bounced off the room’s white walls. Over a floor strewn with leaves, women dressed in billowing white dresses danced in circles while answering every sung call from the lead drummer. Occasionally, a dancer would fall into a trance, body shaking, head rolled back until another woman would approach her, rub her back and whisper words that would bring her back to this plane.

Over the course of the night, I watched as practitioners of Candomblé, a religion originating with the enslaved Africans brought to Brazil hundreds of years ago, paid their respects to Oxóssi, one of the pantheon of orixás that form a link between this world and that of the divine. For four and a half hours, the music barely stopped.