The terreiro form took shape in Salvador da Bahia in the early nineteenth century, built by enslaved and freed Yoruba, Fon and Central African women and men who had to reconstruct their religious worlds from memory rather than from any surviving institution transplanted whole across the Atlantic. The house most often named as the oldest is Casa Branca, also called Ile Axe Iya Nasso Oka, founded by Yoruba priestesses in the early decades of the century and treated by many later terreiros as the root lineage, the matriz, from which their own founding priests or priestesses trace descent.
Several of Bahia's other major terreiros, including Gantois and Ile Axe Opo Afonja, emerged directly from succession disputes and departures among Casa Branca's own priestesses over the rest of the nineteenth century, so that the houses that look today like separate, independent traditions are in a real sense one lineage that split repeatedly rather than several unrelated foundings.
Because Brazilian law and colonial custom generally denied African religious practice any recognised institutional standing, this branching first happened as a matter of family and household authority rather than through any formal charter, leaving oral lineage claims, not documents, as the primary record of how one terreiro relates to another.