Brazil (Minas Gerais)
Diamantina
DIAMANTINA, home town of Juscelino Kubitschek, the president responsible for the creation of Brasília, is the only historic city to the north of Belo Horizonte and, at six hours by bus, is by some way the furthest from it. Yet the journey itself is one of the reasons for going there, as the road heads into the different landscapes of northern Minas on its way to the sertão mineiro. The second half of the 288-kilometre journey is much the most spectacular, so to see it in daylight you need to catch either the 5.30am, 9am or 11.30am bus from Belo Horizonte.
Diamantina has a very different atmosphere to any of the other colonial towns. Still a functioning diamond-mining town, it is also the gateway to the Jequitinhonha Valley, the river valley that is the heart of the Minas sertão. The green hills of the southern half of Minas seem very distant in Diamantina, set in a rocky, windswept and often cold highland zone – take a sweater or jacket.

Catedral and other churches
Despite the comparative ugliness of the Catedral Metropolitana de Santo Antônio, built in 1940 on the site of an old colonial church, the cathedral square is worth savouring. It’s lined with sobrados, many of them with exquisite ornamental bronze- and ironwork, often imported from Portugal – look closely and you’ll see iron pineapples on the balconies. Most impressive of all are the serried windows of the massive Prefeitura, and the ornate Banco do Brasil building next to it – possibly unique in Brazil in that it spells the country name the old way, with a “z”.

For the other churches, you’re faced with two problems. Some are closed for restoration, which is taking years, and though the workmen are usually happy to let you in you’re not seeing them at their best. Also, in recent years, a rash of thefts of artworks from churches in and around Diamantina has made people very reluctant to open them up for visitors. Some of the thieves were foreigners, and this has made people even more suspicious, so unless you can wheedle in Portuguese you stand little chance of getting in: ask at the nearest house for the zelador (guardian), and try your luck. Fortunately, with one exception, the exteriors are actually more interesting than the interiors. Diamantina churches are very distinctive, simple but very striking, with stubby towers and Chinese eaves: street names, like Rua Macau de Meio and Rua Macau de Cima, recall where the Chinese craftsmen imported by the Portuguese lived during the eighteenth century.

The one church worth trying to see the inside of, if at all possible, is the Igreja de Nossa Senhora do Carmo (Tues–Sat 1–5pm, Sun 9am–noon) on Rua Bonfim. Built between 1760 and 1765, legend has it that the heir of Diamantina’s richest miner made sure the tower was built at the back of the church rather than the front, as was usual, so the bells didn’t disturb his wife’s beauty sleep. Inside is an atypically florid interior, whose two main features are a rich, intricately carved altar screen and a gold-sheathed organ, which was actually built in Diamantina.

On the cobbled street leading down the hill from here is a local curiosity. The church at the bottom, Igreja de Nossa Senhora do Rosário (Tues–Sat 1–5pm, Sun 9am–noon), has a tree growing in front of it: look closely and you can see a large distorted wooden cross embedded in the trunk and lower branches. The story behind this reads like something from Gabriel García Márquez, but did really happen. The year the old Sé church was knocked down, in 1932, the padre of Rosário planted a wooden cross outside his church to commemorate the chapel that old Diamantina had originally been built around. A fig tree sprouted up around it so that at first the cross seemed to flower – there’s a photo of it at this stage in the Museu do Diamante – and eventually, rather than knocking it down, the tree grew up around the cross and ended up absorbing it. Inside the church itself is a marvellous Baroque altar and a simple, yet stunning, painted ceiling.

Jequitinhonha Valley
If you want to get a clearer idea of where the Jequitinhonha artesanato comes from, you have to head out into the sertão proper, and Diamantina is the obvious place to start your journey. Travelling into the Jequitinhonha Valley is not something to be undertaken lightly: it is one of the poorest and remotest parts of Brazil, the roads are bad, there are no hotels except bare flophouse dormitórios, and unless you speak good Portuguese you are liable to be looked on with great suspicion. There have been problems in recent years with foreigners buying up mining concessions and kicking out garimpeiros, and unless you can explain yourself people will assume you have ulterior motives. The region is so poor and isolated it’s difficult for people to understand why outsiders, especially foreigners, would want to go there anyway.

If you need reasons, though, you don’t have to look much further than the scenery, which is spectacularly beautiful, albeit forbidding. The landscapes bear some resemblance to the deserts of the American Southwest: massive granite hills and escarpments, cactus, rock, occasional wiry trees and people tough as nails speaking with the lilting accent of the interior of the Northeast. Here you’re a world away from the developed sophistication of southern and central Minas.

It seems wrong to call somewhere as off the beaten track as ARAÇUAÍ easy to get to, but it is the most accessible Jequitinhonha destination from Diamantina. Booking the day before is usually essential for one of the two daily buses (currently 2am and 1.30pm) to Araçuaí – and the journey is hard: over five hours of bouncing around on dusty dirt roads, hot as hell during the day and cold at night. The dormitório by the bus station is your only option for accommodation; take a hammock to avoid having to sleep in one of their beds. Araçuaí is no more than a large village, but it has the best place for buying artesanato in the whole region – a producers’ co-operative called Centro de Artesanato, open Tuesday to Saturday but best to catch on a Saturday morning, when craft workers come in from the surrounding villages to market.

From Araçuaí, if time were no object, you could hop local buses to Itinga and then on 30km to the good-quality BR-116 highway into Bahia state. Once you get to Vitória da Conquista there are ready connections to all Bahian cities, but it could well take you a couple of days to get that far. It is often quicker to take the bus that leaves every other day to Belo Horizonte and make your connections there.

Mercado dos Tropeiros
Diamantina’s other important economic role is as the market town for the Jequitinhonha Valley. It’s here that the products of the remote sertão towns of northeastern Minas are shipped and stockpiled before making their way to Belo Horizonte. The old Mercado dos Tropeiros on Praça Barão do Guaicuí, just a block downhill from the cathedral square, is the focus of Diamantina’s trade, and worth seeing for the building alone, an interesting tiled wooden structure built in 1835 as a trading station by the Brazilian army. Its frontage, a rustic but very elegant series of shallow arches, played a significant role in modern Brazilian architecture. Niemeyer, who lived in Diamantina for a few months in the 1950s to build the Hotel do Tijuco, was fascinated by it, and later used the shape for the striking exterior of the presidential palace in Brasília, the Palácio da Alvorada.

The market itself (Saturdays only) has a very Northeastern feel, with its cheeses, doces, blocks of salt and raw sugar, and mules and horses tied up alongside the pick-ups. The food at the stalls here is very cheap, but only for the strong-stomached: the rich mineiro sausages (linguiça) are worth trying. The rest of the week the market is used for exhibitions and book stalls. From the market you have a fine vantage point of a square which is, if anything, even richer than the Praça Conselheiro Mota, a cornucopia of colonial window frames and balconies and exquisite ironwork. Most of the ground floors are still ordinary shops, open throughout the week.

The artesanato section of the market is small and uninspiring, which is unfortunate since the most distinctive products of the Jequitinhonha Valley are its beautiful clay and pottery figures. The Casa da Cultura, on Praça Antônio Eulálio, has a very good collection which enables you to get a grasp of what the Jequitinhonha potters do, but buying it is difficult. The most reliable place is a friendly and very reasonably priced specialist shop, Relíquias do Vale, on the same street as the Hotel do Tijuco, at Rua Macau do Meio 401. Besides the pottery, they also have a good stock of the rough but very rugged cotton clothes, hammocks, arraiolos carpets and wall hangings that are the other specialities of the region. You’ll find numerous other carpet shops dotted around town.

Museu do Diamante
The Museu do Diamante (Tues–Sat noon–5.30pm, Sun & holidays 9am–noon) on the cathedral square is the best place to get an idea of what garimpagem has meant to Diamantina. It’s one of the best museums in Minas, not so much for the glories of its exhibits but for the effort it makes to give you an idea of daily life in old Diamantina.

The room behind the entrance desk is devoted to the history of mining in Diamantina: old mining instruments, maps and prints. Dominating everything is an enormous cast-iron English safe, brought by ox cart all the way from Rio in the eighteenth century – it took eighteen months to get here. It contains a riveting display of genuine gold, and diamond jewellery and cut diamonds which are replicas: the originals are stashed in the Banco do Brasil across the road. On the upper shelf is a (genuine) pile of uncut diamonds and emeralds, as they would appear to garimpeiros panning – only the occasional dull glint distinguishes them from ordinary gravel. More disturbing is an appalling display of whips, chains and brands used on slaves right up until the late nineteenth century, though the terrifying-looking tongs, underneath the chains, are in fact colonial hair-curlers, and not torture instruments.

The rest of the museum is great to wander through, stuffed with memorabilia from mouldering top hats to photos of long-dead town bandsmen: Diamantina has strong musical traditions and still supports serestas, small bands of accordion, guitar and flute players who stroll through the streets and hold dances around Carnaval, or on the evening of September 12, the Dia da Seresta.

The road to Diamantina
Diamantina itself, scattered down the steep side of a rocky valley, faces escarpments the colour of rust; the setting has a lunar quality you also come across in parts of the Northeastern sertão. In fact, at Diamantina you’re not quite in the sertão – that begins roughly at Araçuaí, some 300km to the north – but in the uplands of the Serra do Espinhaço, the highlands that form the spine of the state. Almost as soon as you leave Belo Horizonte, the look of the land changes to the stubby trees and savanna of the Planalto Central, the inland plateau that makes up much of central Brazil. Some 60km from Belo Horizonte you pass the Rei do Mato cave, and after another 54km, roughly halfway to Diamantina, the road forks – left to Brasília and the Planalto proper, right to Diamantina and the sertão.

You hit the highland foothills soon after the dull modern town of Curvelo, and from then on the route is very scenic. The well-maintained road winds its way up spectacularly forbidding hills, the granite outcrops enlivened by cactus, wild flowers and the bright yellow and purple ipê trees, until it reaches the upland plateau, 1300m above sea level. This heralds yet another change: windswept moorland with few trees and strange rock formations. Look carefully on the left and you’ll see traces of an old stone road, with flagstones seemingly going nowhere. This is the old slave road, which for over a century was the only communication line between southern Minas and the sertão.

Practicalities
Maps are free from the tourist office in the Casa da Cultura, tucked away at Praça Antônio Eulálio 53 (Mon–Fri 8am–6pm, Sat 9am–5pm, Sun 8am–noon; tel 038/3531-1636). There’s also a tourist post in the Rodoviária (daily 8–11am & 1–6pm), but it’s often shut because of staff shortages. The receptions at the Hotel do Tijuco and the Dália Hotel, and the Museu do Diamante, also hand out maps.

Hotels are plentiful. The largest, priciest and most comfortable is the Pousada do Garimpo, a five-minute walk from the town centre at Av. da Saudade 265, on the western continuation of Rua Direita (tel 038/3531-2523, fax 3531-2316; $35–50); the hotel is friendly and well equipped (including a pool), but has a somewhat soulless feel to it. Much more interesting, and cheaper too, is the town’s Niemeyer creation, the Hotel do Tijuco, Rua Macau do Meio 211 (tel & fax 038/3531-1022; $20–$50), where it’s worth splashing out on one of the more expensive “luxo” rooms, which are larger and brighter and have balconies offering wonderful views across Diamantina. The Dália Hotel, Praça J Kubitschek 25 (tel 038/3531-1477, fax 3531-3526; $20–35), just down from the cathedral, is possibly the best value in town. Housed in a lovely two-storey building, it has bags of character, good rooms and fine views over the square. Another good bet is the Pousada dos Cristais, Rua Jogo da Bola 53, west from Rua Direita (tel 038/3531-2897; $20–35), a very pleasant family-run place with comfortable, rustic rooms. If you want somewhere cheaper still in the old part of town, the Pousada Gameleira, Rua do Rosário 209 (tel 038/3531-1900) is an attractive choice and charges around $8 per person; ask for a room facing the Igreja do Rosário. Other cheap options, with quartos upwards of $5 per person, are clustered around the Rodoviária in the upper part of town, and are ideal if you can’t face the prospect of lugging your luggage uphill when it’s time to leave: Hotel JK, for example, immediately opposite the bus station at Praça Dom João 135 (tel 038/3531-1142; $10–20), is perfectly decent.

The streets around the cathedral are the heart of the town, and there’s no shortage of simple bars and mineiro restaurants here, though the food on offer is rather uninspiring. Reasonable ones include the Capistrana on Praça Antônio Eulálio, and Espeto de Prata on Beco da Pena just off Rua Direita, a sophisticated churrasco joint with live music Thursdays to Sundays. Best of all is Cantinha do Marinho on Rua Direita 113, in front of the cathedral: the food is good and offers the best value for money in town; try a doce de limão to round off your meal. There’s a good cake shop opposite the Casa da Cultura on Praça Antônio Eulálio. The main focus of weekend nightlife activity is Rua Direita: the busiest bar is Oasis Clube at no. 132 (daily 8am–late), which has live music upstairs on Friday and Sunday evenings and a disco on Saturdays. Opposite, the tiny cellar bar Taberna do Gilmar (Wed–Sat 8pm onwards) has the town’s loudest music system, playing a mixture of Brazilian and rock. Another place to try is the cavern-like Bar do Japão on Beco da Tecla, an alleyway near the mercado.