The objective of this paper is to focus the role accorded to tradition as a component of a social-historical dynamics schemed among different groups in Salvador, but whose effect defined a way of modernization connected with the crossing of group identities, immaterial and architectural patrimonies, the transit of images and the informational capitalism. Such way of modernization defined a touristic experience marked by the uses, by the city and in the city, that are made of space, of memory and of cultural expressions, resources that are decisive and, at the same time, they revolve a land of social-symbolic contradictions that feed the symbolic economy.
innovation; bahian tradition; touristic modernization; services