Brazil (Rio de Janeiro State)
Minas Gerais
The French geologist Gorceix summed up Minas Gerais 150 years ago, when he wrote that the state had “a breast of iron and a heart of gold”. Its hills and mountains contain the richest mineral deposits in Brazil, and led to the area being christened “General Mines” when gold and diamonds were found at the end of the seventeenth century. The gold strikes sparked a wave of migration from Rio and São Paulo, which lasted a century and shifted the centre of gravity of Brazil’s economy and population from the northeast decisively to the south, where it has remained ever since. In the nineteenth century new metals, especially iron, steel and manganese, replaced gold in importance, while the uplands in the west and east proved ideal for coffee production. Land too steep for coffee bushes was converted to cattle pasture, and the luxuriant forests of southern Minas were destroyed and turned into charcoal for smelting. The bare hills are a foretaste of what parts of Amazônia might look like a century from now, and only their strange beauty – sea-like, as waves of them recede into the distance – saves them from seeming desolate.
Mineral wealth still flows from Minas’ hills, but iron, bauxite, manganese and steel have superseded the precious metals of colonial times. The eighteenth-century mining settlements of Minas Gerais are now quiet and beautiful colonial towns, with a fraction of the population they had two hundred years ago. They’re called as cidades históricas, “the historic cities”, and are the only colonial survivals in southern Brazil that stand comparison with the Northeast. Most importantly, they’re the repository of a great flowering of Baroque religious art that took place here in the eighteenth century: arte sacra mineira was the finest work of its time in the Americas, and Minas Gerais can lay claim to undisputably the greatest figure in Brazilian cultural history – the mulatto leper sculptor, Aleijadinho, whose magnificent work is scattered throughout the historic cities. The most important of the cidades históricas are Ouro Preto, Mariana and Sabará, all within easy striking distance of Belo Horizonte, and Congonhas, São João del Rei, Tiradentes and Diamantina, a little further afield.

In more recent times, too, Minas Gerais has been at the centre of Brazilian history. Mineiros have a well-deserved reputation for political cunning, and have produced the two greatest postwar Brazilian presidents: Juscelino Kubitschek, the builder of Brasília, and Tancredo Neves, midwife to the rebirth of Brazilian democracy in 1985. It was troops from Minas who put down the São Paulo revolt against Getúlio Vargas’ populist regime in the brief civil war of 1932 and, less creditably, the army division in Minas which moved against Rio in 1964 and ensured the success of the military coup.

In keeping with this economic and political force, the capital of Minas, Belo Horizonte, is a thriving, modern metropolis – one of the largest cities in Brazil and second only to São Paulo as an industrial centre, which, with its forest of skyscrapers and miles of industrial suburbs, it rather resembles. It lies in the centre of the rich mining and agricultural hinterland that has made the state one of the economic powerhouses of Brazil, running from the coffee estates of western Minas to the mines and cattle pastures of the valley of the Rio Doce, in the east of the state. You can read the area’s history in its landscape, the jagged horizons a direct result of decades of mining. The largest cities of the region apart from Belo Horizonte are Juiz de Fora in the south, Governador Valadares to the east, and Uberaba and Uberlândia in the west – all modern and unprepossessing; only Belo Horizonte can honestly be recommended as worth visiting.

All mineiros would agree that the soul of the state lies in the rural areas, in the hill and mountain villages of its vast interior. North of Belo Horizonte, the grassy slopes and occasional patches of forest are swiftly replaced by the stubby trees and savanna of the Planalto Central (leading to Brasília and central Brazil proper); and in northeastern Minas, by the cactus, rock and perennial drought of the sertão – as desperately poor and economically backward as anywhere in the Northeast proper. The northern part of the state is physically dominated by the hills and highlands of the Serra do Espinhaço, a range which runs north–south through the state like a massive dorsal fin, before petering out south of Belo Horizonte. To its east, the Rio Jequitinhonha sustains life in the parched landscapes of the sertão mineiro; to the west is the flat river valley of the Rio São Francisco, which rises here before winding through the interior of the Northeast. The extreme west of Minas Gerais state is taken over by the agricultural Triângulo Mineiro, an extremely wealthy region centred on the city of Uberlândia, with far closer economic ties with São Paulo than with the rest of Minas Gerais. Many people in the Triângulo Mineiro believe that the region would benefit from being a separate state, a cause that some local politicians have adopted.

In the southwest of Minas, in fine mountainous scenery near the border with São Paulo, are a number of spa towns built around mineral water springs: São Lourenço and Caxambu are small and quiet, but Poços de Caldas is a large and very lively resort. Perhaps the most scenically attractive part of Minas Gerais – certainly the least visited – is the eastern border with Espírito Santo. There’s some spectacular walking country in the Caparaó national park, where the third highest mountain in Brazil, the 2890-metre Pico da Bandeira, is more easily climbed than its height suggests.

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