as many of you know, bahia has a lot of holidays. now that i have been here just over a year, i have witnessed many of them firsthand, although my level of participation varies. half the time i don’t even know it’s a holiday, whether it’s a monday or a weekend, until it’s already happening or i go to a store and find it closed.
last year i was sitting on my balcony and noticed a small bonfire in the street. small enough that no one around seemed concerned, so i didn’t worry about it either. around that same time, i started noticing the offerings in the smaller local stores and chains shifting toward more festive, traditional, grab-and-go kinds of foods. corn-based things. seasonal displays. and men walking around in straw hats.
i could tell something was happening. i just didn’t understand what yet.
around that same time, i had decided i needed more greenery in my life. i wanted open space, somewhere i could take my shoes off, walk, and relax. of course, many people told me that what i wanted was not really possible in bahia, that i would need to move somewhere else. but they obviously didn’t know me well enough to know that i am very lucky when it comes to getting what i want, especially when it has to do with land and homes.
my friend J, arranged for some friends of a friend to pick me up and take me to the interior, where i’d stay at a hostel for a couple of days while i did more research and figured out where to move. i had visited this place before and liked it. it still wasn’t the green i had imagined, but it was greener than living in the busy city of salvador.
we left late in the afternoon, and along the long drive through smaller towns, i kept seeing bonfires in the distance and along the road. the closer we got, the more people i saw out in their small neighborhoods, gathered around fires, eating, talking, celebrating.
i don’t speak portuguese, and the people in the car with me didn’t speak english, except for the driver. eventually i asked him what was happening. he told me it was são joão.
são joão is the feast of saint john the baptist, celebrated on june 24, and it’s part of the larger festas juninas — the june festivals that also include santo antônio on june 13 and são pedro on june 29. the tradition came to brazil through portuguese catholic colonization but became something deeply brazilian over time, especially in the northeast. the bonfires, the straw hats, the plaid, the corn, the forró, the quadrilha dances — all of it points back to rural life, harvest traditions, and country memory. even when it happens in the city, são joão is reaching toward the interior.
and suddenly, all the little pieces i had been noticing for weeks made sense. the bonfire on my street. the straw hats. the food. the shift in rhythm.
although it wasn’t planned, as it always seems to work out, i ended up in the right place at the right time. i found exactly what i had gone looking for, but i also got something extra. i got to experience my first são joão from a more genuine place, in the countryside, among local people, where the celebration wasn’t staged for tourists or turned into a public spectacle.
i’ll say this carefully, because são joão is easy to flatten into cute content. straw hats, plaid, corn, flags, bonfires, pretty pictures. but it’s tied to catholic history, rural identity, harvest traditions, and the way northeastern communities remember themselves. there is a long-standing criticism that festas juninas can turn rural people into caricatures when the clothing and customs are treated like costumes instead of culture. what i saw in the interior didn’t feel like that. it felt like memory.
people will tell you são joão is best in the interior, and now i understand why.