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manganese and steel have superseded the precious metals of colonial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.