Eighty years ago, the Brazilian writer Jorge Amado published Captains of the Sands, a powerfully moving novel about the lives of a gang of orphaned children living on the streets of Salvador, north-east Brazil. Today, thousands of adolescents and children still live rough in the city. Their lives are still marked by poverty and crime, intensified since Amado’s day by the growth of the drugs trade. But they still find alternative bonds of family in the kind of gangs that Amado would have recognised.

Writer/presenter

Crossing Continents, 29 March 2017

Producer: James Fletcher