Estrada Real (King’s Road): Historic Cities of Minas Gerais
by Bill Hinchberger
Rose Brasil (ABR) Ouro Preto
Ouro Preto - “Ouro Preto is a city that hasn’t changed, and therein lies its incomparable charm.” Hyperbole. But perhaps we should grant writer Manuel Bandeira his little exaggeration. The modernist wrote that line not in one of his illustrious poems but in a 1938 guidebook he authored about the former gold mining town in Brazil.
Four decades before Bandeira wrote his guidebook, Ouro Preto lost its status as state capital of Minas Gerais. This symbolic slap in the face came after most of the gold had run out. Today the city once again finds itself at the center of things – this time as a hub of the revival of the Estrada Real, the 900-mile King’s Road that dates to the 17th century. Gold and diamonds once moved along the highway from Minas Gerais to ports and then onto Portugal. Today tourists, many of them foreigners, are making the moves. “As we like to say, you took our 'ouro' (gold), now bring us the euro,” jokes-in-rhyme Eberhard Hans Aichinger, managing director of the Estrada Real Institute, a non-profit tourism development outfit.
Because of pop mystic and Brazilian homeboy Paulo Coelho’s best selling book about the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, Brazilians most often compare the Estrada Real to Spain’s religious path. But for its diversity and historical significance, the Estrada Real would perhaps be better characterized as a heavyweight version of Route 66 in the United States. Ana Celeste da Costa recognized the Route 66 parallel almost intuitively. Melbourne, her São Paulo-based tour operator, sends sundry Brazilians motorcycle buffs to make the Chicago-Los Angeles spree. Now she’s bringing Americans and Europeans to the Estrada Real.
On the Estrada Real, religious quests are certainly part of the equation; the Lord knows that there are enough of those churches with their gold leafed altars. But there’s a lot more. The history of Brazil cannot be told without the Estada Real - not the political history, not the economic history, not the cultural history, and definitely not the history of the dispossessed, be they slaves, women, prospectors, or smugglers.
A quick example. As with the 1849 California gold rush, the deposits in Minas Gerais attracted free spirits quite happy with the scanty official presence on the frontier. In Brazil, most of the miners came from neighboring São Paulo state. When the Portuguese crown tried to crack down on evasion of its 20% gold tax in 1720, several days of “rage and death” swept Ouro Preto, according to an official report to authorities. Today travelers to the Itacolomi State Park just outside Ouro Preto can visit the restored Casa Bandeirista, the tax collection station on the Estrada Real. Completed in 1708, it is considered to the first public building in the state. Once off-limits to hikers and other ecotourists, Itacolomi park recently opened its doors to the public as part of a statewide initiative to try to reconcile conservation with recreation.
Like Route 66, in many places the Estrada Real exists more in spirit than as an actual road or trail. Entire stretches have succumbed to urban development, road building, or just plain neglect. Rainforests and cattle pastures have often overrun royal right-of-way.
Again, like Route 66, the Estrada Real had more than one incarnation. A little less than half way from its northernmost point, Diamantina, the road divides into two branches – the original one leading to colonial town Paraty and a later one built in the early 18th century to now megalopolis Rio de Janeiro.
Contemporary voyagers – on motorbikes or using other conventional means of locomotion - can follow one route or the other. Or they can mix and match. Most slice off a manageable section and stick to that. One of the pioneers of the Estrada Real as a tourism concept, Tullio Marques, runs horseback trips at the Fazendo do Cipó near Belo Horizonte. He’s traversed the entire route, but suggests that visitors limit their time in the saddle to a day. “Then they can do something else at night, like hear the “congada” (traditional Black music from Minas Gerais) performance we heard last night, instead of sleeping in the bush,” he said.
That extra time can be used to visit Itabira, hometown of poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, or Congonhas and its famous soapstone Old Testament prophets, completed in 1803. The prophets stand in front of the city’s most famous church. Many people visit them as religious shrines, and indeed they are. But some scholars believe they also convey a political message.
A few years before sculptor Aleijadinho undertook this project, the Portuguese crown had cracked down on the “Inconfidência Mineira,” an anti-colonial movement inspired by the French Revolution and the U.S. War of Independence, centered in Minas Gerais. Officials killed leader Tiradentes and exiled many others. Sympathetic to the movement, the story goes, Aleijadinho managed to include in each statue a symbol in homage to a dead or banished rebel.
For some reason, poets were over represented in the Inconfidência movement, and the prophets reflect this. The prophet Daniel, for example, is wearing an uncharacteristic laurel crown, something more appropriate for a poet. Some scholars then suggest that Daniel represents the rebel and poet Tomás Antônio Gonzaga.
A half-century ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Elizabeth Bishop and a companion made a trip from Rio de Janeiro to Ouro Preto. They rode in a slick sports car, but hardly in style. Judging from the description, they may have made the trip on the Estrada Real itself. After a stretch of newly laid asphalt, wrote Carmen L. Oliveira in her book Rare and Commonplace Flowers, “they had to proceed on the old road, forcing the low-slung Jaguar to swerve between the craters. They covered fifty kilometers in six hours, punctuated by [her companion’s] copious list of cusswords. In a triumphant entrance, they got to Ouro Preto at night, dragging the tailpipe knocked loose by a pothole.” The trip netted a flat tire and culminated in “hotels totally inadequate” for her companion.
Today the quality of infrastructure along the Estrada Real might vary, but main roads are all paved and popular historic cities all offer a wide array of top-notch inns. Comfort is nice, but the American poet seemed happy to ignore the hardships. “Bishop fell in love with the city,” wrote Oliveira. “She left resolved to return there many times.”
