Bahia’s cultural and commercial elite gathered along Rua Chile, Brazil’s oldest planned street, dating to Salvador’s founding in the 16th century, and by the early 1930s the corridor had filled with upscale shops trading everything from imported fabric to Chinese porcelain. The Palace Hotel opened there in 1934 as Bahia’s first true luxury hotel, its triangular footprint and Art Deco facade deliberately modeled on New York’s Flatiron Building.
Its ground floor housed a shopping arcade and its second floor a casino, and the hotel quickly became a fixture of Salvador’s nightlife and its Afro-Brazilian cultural scene, drawing guests including Carmen Miranda, Orson Welles, and poet Pablo Neruda. Novelist Jorge Amado used the hotel’s historic casino as a setting in his 1966 novel Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands. The hotel closed in the 1980s as the neighborhood declined and sat shuttered for roughly two decades before entrepreneurs Marcelo Lima and Antonio Mazzafera bought and restored it, reopening as the Fera Palace in 2016 with 81 rooms and a rooftop pool overlooking All Saints Bay.