The Other Brazil: Minas Gerais
Kevin Moloney for The New York Times
A wedding picture in front of the Nossa Senhora de Conceição in the town of Ouro Preto.
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LinkedinDiggFacebookMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalinkBy SETH KUGEL
Published: October 25, 2009
THE map showed two obvious ways to get from Catas Altas, a sleepy village in the foothills of southeast Brazil, to our hotel at Serra do Cipó National Park, a highland steppe with vertiginous canyons and cave paintings. There was the wimpy way, a roundabout route that would take us over smooth asphalt and trusty highways. And then there was the manly path: a direct shot along rutted dirt roads that wound through lazy towns like Taquaraçu de Minas and Jaboticatubas.
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Brazil Travel Guide
Go to the Brazil Travel Guide »
The Other Brazil: Minas Gerais »
36 Hours in Montevideo »
Mazatlán’s Old Town Is Spry »
A Graceful Window on Colonial Colombia »
Rio Hot Spot With Miami Vibe »
Santiago Is Hardly Sleepy »
Bargains in Latin America »
Inexpensive Restaurant Choices
in Lima, Peru »
Hotel Review: cE Hotel de Diseño, Buenos Aires »
Multimedia
Slide Show
Brazil’s Rural Heartland: Minas Gerais
Map
Minas Gerais I couldn’t blame my travel companions, Adam and Neil, writer friends from New York City, for leaning towards taking the easier route. Our rental car, a silver Chevy Prisma with a low-hanging chassis, wasn’t exactly fit for dusty rural shortcuts. But we were in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, where bumping along dirt roads is part of the thrill. So straight ahead we went.
The first stretch took us through green pastures and cornfields demarcated with fences made from barbed wire and jagged wooden stakes. Then, around one bend, a whitewashed, red-tile-roofed mansion appeared like a mirage in the dust. Curious, we pulled up, wandered through the out-of-place manicured lawn and found a gentleman farmer from the city examining his banana orchards. Rather than shoot us for trespassing, he invited us in for coffee and homemade guava paste.
For me, that was a typical moment in Minas Gerais, Brazil’s second-most populous state but considered by many to be its rural heartland.
I had taken my two friends to Minas Gerais to show them what I think too many foreign travelers like them miss: the Brazil that lies beyond the Christ on the hill in Rio, the eco-lodges of the Amazon and the model-flecked beaches of Florianópolis. Instead of a cross on a hill, Minas has colonial towns loaded with Baroque-style churches. Instead of vast rain forests, Minas has gorgeous mountains and countless waterfalls. And instead of beaches, it’s the home of a country cooking style famed across this nation of more than 190 million.
We started out on a Sunday from Rio de Janeiro, and made a four-hour drive north into the mountains to Tiradentes, one of many Baroque-church-studded colonial towns that had their glory days in the 18th century when Minas Gerais (“General Mines”) was a gold and diamond cash cow for the Portuguese crown.
Tiradentes is considered to be the most romantic of them, with cobblestone streets, painstakingly restored homes and churches, shops loaded with traditional local sweets and cheeses, and rows of intimate restaurants. If you’re thinking this is probably not the ideal spot for three single male travelers, you’re of one mind with Neil and Adam, who were particularly amused that I insisted on arriving in time for afternoon tea at Solar da Ponte, an inn where I had booked a room.
The mansionlike Solar da Ponte is owned by the British-Brazilian couple John and Anna Maria Parsons, who began restoring the place in the early 1970s. Common spaces are loaded with books and art, and our rooms fell in the sweet spot where elegantly rustic wood furniture meets magically modern mattresses. The manicured grounds house a family of tamarin monkeys, which every morning approach the windowsills of the dining room looking for (and getting) handouts.
We did, in fact, make it in time for tea, a hybrid Anglo-Brazilian tea service with gingham tablecloths, black tea with milk and manioc-flour cheese buns called pães de queijo. I think we all had to agree that even if the company was not ideal, the afternoon pickup most certainly was.
Post-tea, we realized we had timing on our side. We happened to hit Tiradentes on the day of the state soccer finals, so instead of a late afternoon of museum and church stops, we opted instead for beer, along with a friendly, drunken, mostly female crew in a combination grocery-store-beer-joint called Bar do Bizuca. A victory by the blue-clad Cruzeiro club, on penalty kicks, brought the town right out of the romanticized 18th century and into the horn-honking, stereo-blasting world of 21st-century soccer fandom. We followed it up with our first encounter with Mineiro cuisine, a meal of fried pork sausage and stewed chicken with ora-pro-nobis, a local leafy green, at Viradas do Largo restaurant.
Tiradentes turns in early, which was just fine because, the following morning, I had a perfect three-guys activity: a mountain hike led by a bullet-scarred guide. Cool. Our man Marcelo had grown up in Rio, getting around by motorbike, as many do, until one day thieves on another bike tried to pull him over at gunpoint. He was able to ram them and escape, but not before taking a bullet in the thigh. Really stupid, yet really awesome.
That incident led him to a more peaceful life in the Tiradentes area, where he and his brother run a company called Lazer e Aventuras. The two-hour hike he led took us into the São José Mountains on a relatively easy trail built by slaves in the 1700s to create a shortcut between Tiradentes and other mining towns. Up top, thick greenery gave way to scrub, and a panoramic view of towns and farms below.
Lunch after the hike was in a small town turned artists’ colony called Bichinho, and I, thinking I was Mr. Portuguese-Reading-Know-It-All, suggested a restaurant I had found in a Brazilian guidebook. But Marcelo insisted that we go to Tempero da Angela, or Angela’s Seasonings, because it was cheaper and was “real Mineiro food.” That turned out to be an understatement. I do not say this lightly: it may be the greatest lunch deal in the Western Hemisphere.
1 2 3 4 Next Page »
Kevin Moloney for The New York Times
A wedding picture in front of the Nossa Senhora de Conceição in the town of Ouro Preto.
Sign In to E-Mail
Single Page
Reprints
Share
Close
LinkedinDiggFacebookMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalinkBy SETH KUGEL
Published: October 25, 2009
THE map showed two obvious ways to get from Catas Altas, a sleepy village in the foothills of southeast Brazil, to our hotel at Serra do Cipó National Park, a highland steppe with vertiginous canyons and cave paintings. There was the wimpy way, a roundabout route that would take us over smooth asphalt and trusty highways. And then there was the manly path: a direct shot along rutted dirt roads that wound through lazy towns like Taquaraçu de Minas and Jaboticatubas.
Skip to next paragraph
Brazil Travel Guide
Go to the Brazil Travel Guide »
The Other Brazil: Minas Gerais »
36 Hours in Montevideo »
Mazatlán’s Old Town Is Spry »
A Graceful Window on Colonial Colombia »
Rio Hot Spot With Miami Vibe »
Santiago Is Hardly Sleepy »
Bargains in Latin America »
Inexpensive Restaurant Choices
in Lima, Peru »
Hotel Review: cE Hotel de Diseño, Buenos Aires »
Multimedia
Slide Show
Brazil’s Rural Heartland: Minas Gerais
Map
Minas Gerais I couldn’t blame my travel companions, Adam and Neil, writer friends from New York City, for leaning towards taking the easier route. Our rental car, a silver Chevy Prisma with a low-hanging chassis, wasn’t exactly fit for dusty rural shortcuts. But we were in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, where bumping along dirt roads is part of the thrill. So straight ahead we went.
The first stretch took us through green pastures and cornfields demarcated with fences made from barbed wire and jagged wooden stakes. Then, around one bend, a whitewashed, red-tile-roofed mansion appeared like a mirage in the dust. Curious, we pulled up, wandered through the out-of-place manicured lawn and found a gentleman farmer from the city examining his banana orchards. Rather than shoot us for trespassing, he invited us in for coffee and homemade guava paste.
For me, that was a typical moment in Minas Gerais, Brazil’s second-most populous state but considered by many to be its rural heartland.
I had taken my two friends to Minas Gerais to show them what I think too many foreign travelers like them miss: the Brazil that lies beyond the Christ on the hill in Rio, the eco-lodges of the Amazon and the model-flecked beaches of Florianópolis. Instead of a cross on a hill, Minas has colonial towns loaded with Baroque-style churches. Instead of vast rain forests, Minas has gorgeous mountains and countless waterfalls. And instead of beaches, it’s the home of a country cooking style famed across this nation of more than 190 million.
We started out on a Sunday from Rio de Janeiro, and made a four-hour drive north into the mountains to Tiradentes, one of many Baroque-church-studded colonial towns that had their glory days in the 18th century when Minas Gerais (“General Mines”) was a gold and diamond cash cow for the Portuguese crown.
Tiradentes is considered to be the most romantic of them, with cobblestone streets, painstakingly restored homes and churches, shops loaded with traditional local sweets and cheeses, and rows of intimate restaurants. If you’re thinking this is probably not the ideal spot for three single male travelers, you’re of one mind with Neil and Adam, who were particularly amused that I insisted on arriving in time for afternoon tea at Solar da Ponte, an inn where I had booked a room.
The mansionlike Solar da Ponte is owned by the British-Brazilian couple John and Anna Maria Parsons, who began restoring the place in the early 1970s. Common spaces are loaded with books and art, and our rooms fell in the sweet spot where elegantly rustic wood furniture meets magically modern mattresses. The manicured grounds house a family of tamarin monkeys, which every morning approach the windowsills of the dining room looking for (and getting) handouts.
We did, in fact, make it in time for tea, a hybrid Anglo-Brazilian tea service with gingham tablecloths, black tea with milk and manioc-flour cheese buns called pães de queijo. I think we all had to agree that even if the company was not ideal, the afternoon pickup most certainly was.
Post-tea, we realized we had timing on our side. We happened to hit Tiradentes on the day of the state soccer finals, so instead of a late afternoon of museum and church stops, we opted instead for beer, along with a friendly, drunken, mostly female crew in a combination grocery-store-beer-joint called Bar do Bizuca. A victory by the blue-clad Cruzeiro club, on penalty kicks, brought the town right out of the romanticized 18th century and into the horn-honking, stereo-blasting world of 21st-century soccer fandom. We followed it up with our first encounter with Mineiro cuisine, a meal of fried pork sausage and stewed chicken with ora-pro-nobis, a local leafy green, at Viradas do Largo restaurant.
Tiradentes turns in early, which was just fine because, the following morning, I had a perfect three-guys activity: a mountain hike led by a bullet-scarred guide. Cool. Our man Marcelo had grown up in Rio, getting around by motorbike, as many do, until one day thieves on another bike tried to pull him over at gunpoint. He was able to ram them and escape, but not before taking a bullet in the thigh. Really stupid, yet really awesome.
That incident led him to a more peaceful life in the Tiradentes area, where he and his brother run a company called Lazer e Aventuras. The two-hour hike he led took us into the São José Mountains on a relatively easy trail built by slaves in the 1700s to create a shortcut between Tiradentes and other mining towns. Up top, thick greenery gave way to scrub, and a panoramic view of towns and farms below.
Lunch after the hike was in a small town turned artists’ colony called Bichinho, and I, thinking I was Mr. Portuguese-Reading-Know-It-All, suggested a restaurant I had found in a Brazilian guidebook. But Marcelo insisted that we go to Tempero da Angela, or Angela’s Seasonings, because it was cheaper and was “real Mineiro food.” That turned out to be an understatement. I do not say this lightly: it may be the greatest lunch deal in the Western Hemisphere.
1 2 3 4 Next Page »
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