Canudos

There is a lake where the town was. Belo Monte burned on 5 October 1897, five thousand two hundred huts and its two churches taken down with dynamite and kerosene, and seventy years later the Vaza-Barris was dammed and the ashes went under. The Canudos in Bahia you can drive to now is the third town of that name, sitting above the water in the caatinga at four hundred metres.

Antônio Conselheiro was a religious leader from Quixeramobim in Ceará who had walked the interior since the 1860s before the settlement he founded on the Vaza-Barris grew big enough to alarm a four-year-old Republic. Four military expeditions came between November 1896 and October 1897; the first three were beaten back, and the third lost its commander, Colonel Moreira César, at the Fazenda Velha in the early hours of 4 March. Conselheiro took shrapnel in the leg on 6 September and died on 22 September, a fortnight before the end; the army dug him up for a photograph, cut off his head and sent it to a medical professor in Salvador. The Parque Estadual de Canudos holds the ground: the Alto da Favela, taken on the morning of 28 June and looking straight over what is now water, the Fazenda Velha, the Pelados, and the Vale da Morte, a narrow valley the army used as a burial place, where soldiers lie with the women and children who had come out with them. Euclides da Cunha sailed for Bahia on 3 August 1897 and wrote Os Sertões out of what he saw; glass panels now stand at the sites with photographs from the war itself, and at the Alto das Memórias with portraits of survivors and their descendants taken from the late 1940s on.