The settlement became a vila on 13 November 1832 — some sources date it to 9 May 1833 instead — and in 1873 a provincial law elevated it to city status under a name that left nothing to interpretation: Cidade Comercial de Feira de Sant'Anna, the Commercial City of Saint Anne's Fair. Commerce was written into the charter because commerce was the only reason the place existed. The cattle fair drew ranchers off the sertão and buyers up from the coast, and the town grew in the space between them. Ruy Barbosa gave it the nickname it still carries when he called it the Princesa do Sertão in 1919 — Princess of the Backlands, a title that flatters the interior rather than the coast, which was rather the point.

Feira de Santana has monumentalised its own logistics. One statue honours the vaqueiro, the leather-clad cowboy of the northeastern backlands who drove the herds that made the fair. Another honours the truck driver. Between those two figures lies everything the city has been: an animal-powered market town that became a highway junction without ever changing its function. Today it is the second-most populous municipality in Bahia and the largest city in the interior of Brazil's north and northeast, home to the State University of Feira de Santana, a theatre scene around the Amélio Amorim Cultural Center, and a bohemian quarter along Rua São Domingos that locals will tell you is where the city's nightlife was born.

The BR-116, BR-101 and BR-324 meet in this neighbourhood, with the BR-324 running duplicated down to Salvador, and a ring road threads the traffic around the city rather than through it. The bus station handles services to Salvador, Vitória da Conquista, Itabuna, Aracaju, Recife, Brasília, Belém, Fortaleza and across the border to Asunción. That last destination explains Feiraguay, a vast market of imported goods — Chinese, Korean, Japanese, all of it carried up from Paraguay by shuttle traders — reckoned one of the three largest of its kind in Brazil. Gov. João Durval Carneiro Airport (SDIY) sits on the edge of town but runs no scheduled flights; for a plane ticket you go to Salvador.

The Micareta de Feira started in April 1937 and became one of Brazil's first out-of-season carnivals. It still lands two weeks after Easter, and it now bills itself as the largest such festival anywhere. September belongs to ExpoFeira, the agricultural exhibition at the Parque João Martins da Silva, where the cattle fair's descendants still parade their animals. In June the celebration moves out to the rural districts, where São João de Maria Quitéria and São Pedro de Humildes keep the winter festival cycle alive in the countryside that fed the city in the first place.

One of those districts carries the name of a woman born there on 27 July 1792. Maria Quitéria grew up at Licurizeiro in the parish of São José das Itapororocas, now part of Feira de Santana. In October 1822, with Bahia still held by Portuguese forces and the war for Brazilian independence underway, she enlisted disguised as a man and served in the Parakeet Battalion until June 1823. She was promoted to cadet that July and to lieutenant in August, and Emperor Pedro I decorated her with the Imperial Order of the Southern Cross. She is recognised as the first woman to serve in a military unit in Brazil, and she is sometimes called the Brazilian Joan of Arc — a comparison she did not live to enjoy. She died in Salvador on 21 August 1853, poor and largely forgotten, and was rediscovered by her country decades later.