The Portuguese built Brazil's first capital on a cliff 279 feet above the harbor specifically so that goods, particularly sugar, would have to be hauled up the escarpment by enslaved laborers. Tomé de Sousa arrived at the Bay of All Saints on March 29, 1549, with a fleet carrying roughly a thousand settlers, four hundred degredados (convicts offered commutation for colonial service), six Jesuit missionaries including Manuel da Nóbrega, and explicit orders from King João III to establish a fortified administrative center that could withstand French raiders, indigenous resistance, and the endemic lawlessness of the existing colonial settlements. The site chosen for Salvador da Bahia divided naturally into an upper city, where the government, cathedral, and administrative buildings were constructed on the clifftop, and a lower city, where the commercial port, warehouses, and slave markets occupied the waterfront. This geography, designed to concentrate administrative power above and commercial activity below, required a constant flow of human labor to move goods between the two levels. Enslaved Africans carried sugar, tobacco, and cargo on their backs up steep paths for over three centuries. The Lacerda Elevator, built in 1873 and still operating today, finally mechanized the connection between the upper and lower cities, becoming the largest urban elevator system in the world and an inadvertent monument to the labor exploitation it replaced. Salvador served as Brazil's capital until 1763, when the administrative center shifted to Rio de Janeiro. The city's three centuries as a slave-trading hub, through which over 1.5 million enslaved Africans passed, made it the center of Afro-Brazilian culture: Candomblé, capoeira, samba de roda, and the culinary traditions that define Bahian identity all emerged from the cultural fusion that Portugal's colonial planners never anticipated.