Salvador, Brazil · Limited traffic zone
In force in Salvador right nowTuesday, 13 October 2026 at 06:05 · America/Bahia
This rule never switches off, so the scheme is reported as in force at four in the morning on a Sunday. That is the instrument's own shape rather than a gap in the encoding: article 1 of Portaria nº 416/2015 restricts circulation on the six streets with no time qualifier, and neither publisher page adds one.
The exceptions are the whole of the flexibility here and none of them is encoded. A resident registered with Transalvador, a SEMOB-registered coach or taxi setting down passengers, and a delivery inside the 07:00–11:00 Monday-to-Saturday loading window all have permission the rule above will show as refused.
The loading window is a permission, not a period when the street opens. Between 07:00 and 11:00 from Monday to Saturday a delivery may load or unload in the marked bays; ordinary traffic has no more right to be there in those hours than at any other time.
What is enforced in the street is the signage, and we cannot read it. The portaria gives no sign legend and Salvador publishes no register of its street signs, so if a sign on one of these six streets states a narrower window we would have no way to see it. Where a sign in front of you disagrees with this record, the sign is the rule.
Salvador has a second, larger restriction with its own timetable — the Áreas de Restrição de Circulação, which bar lorries above 6.5 m by 2.2 m from the main corridors at three windows of the day. This schedule is only the six historic-centre streets and says nothing about those corridors.
Operating times only, read from the source below. It does not check your vehicle.
Six streets of Salvador's historic centre are closed to general traffic, and unlike the city's lorry restriction this one reaches every vehicle, including a private car.
Transalvador, the municipal traffic superintendency, states that circulation is restricted on Porta do Carmo, Leovigildo de Carvalho, João de Deus, Das Laranjeiras, Santa Isabel and the Largo do Pelourinho — the heart of the Pelourinho, the UNESCO-listed quarter. There is no charge, no day pass and no barrier: access is by registration or not at all.
Residents who can prove they have a parking space of their own are guaranteed access once they register with Transalvador; tourism coaches and taxis registered with the mobility secretariat SEMOB may set down and pick up passengers on those streets at signposted places; and loading and unloading is allowed in signposted areas from Monday to Saturday between 07:00 and 11:00. Everyone else is simply out.
What makes this record firmer than Salvador's other entry is that here we hold the instrument itself, in the publisher's own gazette: Portaria nº 416/2015 of the Transalvador superintendency, signed 3 November 2015 and published in the Diário Oficial do Município of 6 November 2015, Ano XXIX nº 6.456, page 9, which Transalvador hosts as a PDF beside the rule.
Two things the portaria does not do, and neither is guesswork on our part: it puts no clock on the restriction — the only hours in it belong to the loading window — and it names no article of the federal traffic code behind the fine, leaving enforcement to its own Gerência de Fiscalização de Trânsito "em conformidade com o Código de Trânsito Brasileiro", so there is no amount here to quote.
Transalvador (Superintendência do Trânsito do Salvador), Secretaria Municipal de Mobilidade — "Áreas de Restrição Centro Histórico", the authority's own operational citizen system, which states the restriction in the present tense, names the six streets, lists the exceptions and cites the instrument by number
There is no charge. This is a ban, not a charging scheme: Portaria nº 416/2015 restricts circulation on the six streets outright and offers no toll, no day ticket and no payable exemption that would buy a way in.
What stands in place of a payment is a registration — a resident registers with Transalvador after proving a parking space, a tourism operator or taxi registers with SEMOB, an out-of-town coach applies to Transalvador for a temporary registration — and the portaria lists the documents each must produce without naming a fee for any of them.
Neither of Transalvador's two pages for this scheme prices one either, and the tariff table the authority publishes for the services it does sell, which runs from R$ 239,98 for a post-event inspection to R$ 3.236,10 for traffic management on an arterial road, carries nothing for this registration. So if a fee exists it is not printed anywhere we can read, and there is in any case nothing to pay in order to drive in.
The restriction carries no timetable, and that is what the instrument says rather than what we inferred from silence. Article 1 of Portaria nº 416/2015 reads "Restringir a Circulação de veículos nas seguintes ruas do Centro Histórico da Cidade do Salvador" and stops there: no window, no weekday list, no seasonal clause.
Both of Transalvador's public statements of the rule repeat it the same way — "É restringida a Circulação de veículos nas seguintes ruas" — and neither adds an hour.
The only clock anywhere in the portaria belongs to an exception rather than to the ban: article 4 allows loading and unloading in signposted areas "no período de segunda-feira à sábado, no horário de 07:00 às 11:00", Monday to Saturday from seven in the morning to eleven, which means a delivery outside that window has no permission even though a delivery inside it does.
The other two exceptions have no hours at all and hold at any time: a registered resident with a proven parking space may reach it whenever, and a SEMOB-registered coach or taxi may set down and pick up passengers at the signposted points whenever. Public holidays are not mentioned once, and with an all-hours restriction there is nothing for a holiday to switch off.
One limit on this reading is worth stating plainly: what is actually enforced on the ground is the signage, article 1 of the portaria gives no signage legend, and Salvador publishes no register of its street signs — so if a sign on one of these six streets carries a narrower window, we would not be able to see it.
Unlike Porto Alegre, where the municipality's open-data sign register let us read the legend painted on the cordon itself, there is no such channel here.
Transalvador — Portaria nº 416/2015, as published in the Diário Oficial do Município do Salvador of 6 November 2015 (Ano XXIX nº 6.456, page 9) and hosted by Transalvador itself: article 1 restricts circulation with no time qualifier, and article 4 sets the only hours in the instrument, the 07:00–11:00 Monday-to-Saturday loading window
Six streets, named and closed as a list. Portaria nº 416/2015 restricts circulation on Porta do Carmo, Leovigildo de Carvalho, João de Deus, Das Laranjeiras, Santa Isabel and the Largo do Pelourinho, and both of Transalvador's pages repeat exactly those six.
They sit in the Pelourinho, the historic quarter of Salvador that UNESCO lists, a few hundred metres uphill from the Elevador Lacerda; the Largo do Pelourinho is the sloping square the quarter is named after and the Porta do Carmo is the old gate at its northern end.
The list closes: a street in the Centro Histórico that is not one of these six is not in this scheme, and the wider Áreas de Restrição de Circulação that cover the city's main corridors are a separate restriction with a different vehicle test and different hours, recorded separately.
No polygon is published, and here the scheme is genuinely street-shaped rather than area-shaped — six carriageways, not a cordon — so a boundary would have to be drawn rather than read.
We looked for one anyway in the two places Salvador could have put it, on 13 September 2026: the municipal ArcGIS server behind the city's open-data site lists its whole directory without a token — 25 folders, 377 services, 2,715 layers, no folder refused — and searching all of them for restri, carga, caminh, circula, ARC and trânsito returns 74 layers of which not one is a restricted area or a traffic regulation; OpenStreetMap holds no low-emission-zone or toll boundary object within 20 km of the city anchor.
So we warn at city level and give the street names, which is what the publisher gives.
Transalvador — "Áreas de Restrição Centro Histórico", for the closed list of six streets
The authority's own map: Transalvador (Superintendência do Trânsito do Salvador), Secretaria Municipal…
There is no emission standard to meet. Portaria nº 416/2015 sorts vehicles by who is driving them and why — resident with a parking space, registered coach or taxi setting down, delivery inside the loading window — and never by what comes out of the exhaust. No Euro class, no PROCONVE phase and no registration year appears in the instrument or on either of Transalvador's pages.
A brand-new petrol car is as restricted here as a twenty-year-old one.
Not applicable, for the same reason as the petrol standard: fuel is never mentioned. Note also that weight and size are never mentioned either, which is what separates this scheme from Salvador's other one.
The Áreas de Restrição de Circulação turn on a tape measure — a lorry above 6.5 metres long and 2.2 metres wide — while these six streets are closed to "veículos" without qualification, so a motorcycle, a car and an articulated lorry are all in it equally.
Transalvador does not state a figure. Article 5 of Portaria nº 416/2015 hands enforcement to its own Gerência de Fiscalização de Trânsito, which is to act "aplicando as penalidades pertinentes e em conformidade com o Código de Trânsito Brasileiro - C.T.B." — and that is the whole of it.
No article of the federal code is cited, no infraction class is named and no amount appears, in the instrument or on either of the authority's two pages for this scheme.
We will not pick a class out of the national fine table to fill the gap (D-053): the corpus prices a Brazilian breach only when the publisher itself joins the two halves, as Transalvador did for the lorry restriction by writing that it is an infração média of R$ 130,16 with four licence points. It did not do that here.
So the empty amount means the fine was not published, not that there is no fine — a driver should expect to be cited and should not read this blank as impunity.
Transalvador — Portaria nº 416/2015 in the Diário Oficial do Município of 6 November 2015, for the two registration procedures and the documents each requires (articles 2 and 3), the passenger-transport exception (article 1, sole paragraph) and the loading window (article 4)
Transalvador (Superintendência do Trânsito do Salvador), Secretaria Municipal de Mobilidade — "Áreas de Restrição Centro Histórico", served from the authority's own operational citizen system: the present-tense statement of the restriction, the six streets, the three exceptions, the loading window and the instrument number (the endpoint we monitor for all of it)
Transalvador — "Centro Histórico" on the authority's public website, published 17 January 2023. A second, independently maintained publisher channel on a different host and a different content system, carrying the same six streets, the same three exceptions and the same loading window, and linking the gazette PDF itself. Where a scheme's instrument is eleven years old, two channels still stating it is the evidence that it is current (the D-081 test); the wording differs in small ways from the operational page — "cidade de Salvador" against "Cidade do Salvador", "das 7h às 11h" against "de 07:00 às 11:00" — which is how we know the two are maintained separately rather than mirrored
Diário Oficial do Município do Salvador, 6 November 2015, Ano XXIX nº 6.456, page 9 — Portaria nº 416/2015 of the Transalvador superintendency in full, hosted by Transalvador itself and linked from both of its pages for this scheme. Article 1 restricts circulation on the six streets and lets SEMOB-registered coaches and taxis set down passengers; article 2 guarantees residents access after registration and lists the documents; article 3 covers out-of-town tourism vehicles; article 4 sets the 07:00–11:00 Monday-to-Saturday loading window; article 5 hands enforcement to the Gerência de Fiscalização de Trânsito under the federal traffic code without citing an article of it; article 6 brings the portaria into force on the date of publication. Carries no watched strings, because the monitor reads a PDF as text and would report every one of them missing on every run (D-077) — this source is deliberately unwatchable and the two HTML pages above are what withdraws the record if the rule changes
Next scheduled re-check: 2026-12-12.
A city can run more than one scheme, and they do not always answer the same question.