Cities of Gold

Last post from Brazil

Christ this has crept up on me….I’m miles behind in explaining our adventures, having left you last sitting around drinking beers with backpackers in Belo Horizonte…so an abbreviated catch up since then…

We went to Ouro Preto, one of the “cidades historicas” which was once the capital of Minas Gerais state when it was all about the mining. There is indeed a lot of history to be had in Ouro Preto; it’s been declared a World Heritage Site and seems very much like a living museum.

I hold the opinion that history is quite inaccessible unless you’re up close to it, which is why Ouro Preto is an amazing place to spend some time in terms of getting to grips with the forces that shaped the country over the last few centuries –– but also it’s very dull to have it described to you out of context, so I’ll stick to the abridged version.


Ouro Preto’s richness is a result of the ruthless exploitation of two commodotities – gold, and slaves. During the 1500s, gold was discovered in the region and of course everyone flooded in to try and get a piece of the action. Thousands of slaves were shipped in, and tons of gold sent back to Europe. There was quite a bit of warring between the Portuguese, who tried to control the flow of gold by taxing it at 20%, which wound up the settled Brazilians, who tried to get a revolution of the ground with the aim of getting Minas declared an independent state. This was quashed and the leader of the revolution, Tiradentes, (who actually was just the scapegoat fronting the campaign for the rich local gold-moguls) was killed in a rather nasty fashion and bits of his body spread all over the place.

We spent a day going on a long walk around the city, guided by Joao Baptiste, who we’d had the fortune to meet in a bar the previous night. He was an incredible auto-didact with a huge knowledge of architecture and history, who spoke not only perfect English but Spanish, French and German too despite never having finished school. He was born in Ouro Preto, and his family have been there for 8 generations.

The backbreaking work of getting the gold out of the ground was only possible due to the colonialist’s ability to treat humans as animals for their free labour, and the mines died off with abolition. Joao Baptiste was frank and forthright with his explanations of how his ancestors were bought, sold, selectively bred:

“You’ll notice that the black people here are short. Only the short ones were selected to come here and work the mines – the taller black folk were used to cut cotton and work the sugar fields. And then they were bred to be short – if a boy of 12 or 13 looked like he was growing too tall, he’d be castrated.”

In the Casa de Contas, basically for many years the main bank of Minas Gerais, the gold was held on the top floor and the slaves in the bottom – a basement room which is now filled with cases displaying instruments of human subjugation and torture. From my atheist perspective, the punitive Catholicism which gave rise to the glut of awe-inspiring Rococco and Baroque churches in the town was the mental instrument used for the same purpose.

From Ouro Preto, we went to Tiradentes, a small town in stunning countryside which nowadays, we discovered, is exploited for its prettiness (like, it seems, all the pretty towns in Brazil) by far too many antique shops and pousadas. “Some” warned the Lonely Planet, “may find the glut of antique shops cloying”. We were well and truly cloyed within about an hour and a half.Maybe we just weren’t in the mood for it, but I think when too many people are trying to make you pay attention to the history/prettiness of a place, it all just gets a bit irritating. And there’s always the strange phenomenon to be observed of everybody trying to ignore the modern, squinting to blot out the cars and adverts and telephone wires in order to see the “historical”, reframing their photos to crop out the bit that they don’t want to see, which is the reality of the here and now. I find the wilful refusal to accept the present - and the accompanying selective memory making - a little bit disturbing.

Tiradentes is odd to a city girl because of the number of unaccompanied animals wandering round the streets. Not only dogs (of which there are many) but horses and the occasional cow, having a snack outside the post office or ambling down the road. Quite often you’re walking somewhere and they follow you for a bit, which is slightly disconcerting. Sitting bored outside yet another cloying shop, I made the mistake of stroking a friendly dog. The owner of the shop came out and said something to me in Portuguese, which I took to be warning me off doing so, but I couldn’t really understand the explanation apart from something about “todo o mundo”.

Twenty minutes later, we did indeed have todo o mundo, as the dog I’d stroked was joined by another and another and another until we were apparently the leaders of a large pack of them. It’s hard to style out a thronging hoard of canines and we started to feel rather silly. It was however the most exciting thing that happened to us all day, bar an incident when A discovered to her utter horror that her icecream (she’d gone random with the flavours) had cheese in it. Really, it did. Cheese.

Tiradentes was the jumping point, however, for a really stunning day of horse-riding. A and I were taken off on great horses with their owner, Adriano, (followed, of course, by his two dogs) for 3 hours of cantering around the stunning local area. I had feared at one point that riding, which is one of my favourite things, was permanently written off by the slipped disc, so it was exhilarating to be back in the saddle.

And from Tiradentes, it was back to Sao Paulo, which felt strangely like coming home.