Urban sprawl in large Brazilian cities has intensified in recent decades, causing increased demand for urban infrastructure, urban services, and new areas for construction. The central goal of this article is to analyze the characteristics of urban expansion in the Canabrava community and its surroundings, in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, using census data from 1991 and 2010 produced by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). One problem addressed was that the limits of the census tracts differed between the analyzed periods.