In the heart of Pelourinho, you will find an imposing blue colonial mansion that has housed a great treasure of Brazilian culture for 37 years: the collection of the writer couple Jorge Amado and Zélia Gattai. The Fundação Casa de Jorge Amado is located there, which was created to preserve and study the writer’s bibliographic and artistic collections, but he never wanted it to be just a museum.
“What I want is for this house to reflect the meaning of life in Bahia and for this to be the feeling of its existence, and for it to be a meeting place for cultural exchange between Bahia and other places, alongside research and study,” said Jorge Amado.
After nine months of its largest renovation, the Fundação Casa de Jorge Amado reopened on December 2024.
The cultural institution has undergone the largest restoration since its inauguration on March 7, 1987. Its headquarters, which was comprised of houses at numbers 49 and 51 – the well-known Casas Azul and Amarela in Largo do Pelourinho – has now been connected to another building, number 47, the so-called Casa Branca. With the renovation, new exhibition spaces were created. In addition, the site became more accessible, more modern and safer, with the installation of a new and modern fire prevention and monitoring system.
Who is Jorge Amado?
Jorge Amado (born August 10, 1912, in Bahia, Brazil—died August 6, 2001) was a Brazilian novelist whose stories of life in the eastern Brazilian state of Bahia won international acclaim.
Amado grew up on a cacao plantation, Auricídia, and was educated at the Jesuit college in Salvador and studied law at Federal University in Rio de Janeiro. He published his first novel at age 19. Three of his early works deal with the cacao plantations, emphasizing the exploitation and the misery of the migrant Blacks, mulattoes, and poor whites who harvest the crop and generally expressing communist solutions to social problems.
Amado became a journalist in 1930, and his literary career paralleled a career in radical politics that won him election to the Constituent Assembly as a federal deputy representing the Communist Party of Brazil in 1946.
He was imprisoned as early as 1935 and periodically exiled for his leftist activities, and many of his books were banned in Brazil and Portugal. He continued to produce novels with facility, most of them picaresque, ribald tales of Bahian city life, especially that of the racially conglomerate lower classes. “Gabriela, Cravo e Canela” (1958; Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon) and “Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos” (1966; Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands; film, 1978) both preserve Amado’s political attitude in their satire. His later works include “Tenda dos Milagres” (1969; Tent of Miracles), “Tiêta do Agreste” (1977; Tieta, the Goat Girl), “Tocaia Grande” (1984; Show Down), and “O Sumiço da Santa” (1993; The War of the Saints). Amado published his memoirs, “”Navegação de Cabotagem (“Coastal Navigation”), in 1992.
Fontes: Agência Brasil and Britannica