Caraça Natural Park

Dinner finishes at half past seven and people drift out to the steps of the church. Somebody has already put a tray down. Nobody can tell you whether the wolf will come, or when, because it keeps no hours, and the waiting turns out to be most of it: an hour on cold stone under the first neo-Gothic church anyone built in Brazil, listening for something on the gravel.

Caraça is a private nature reserve wrapped around a sanctuary and an old college in the mountains of central Minas Gerais, and the reserve alone accounts for roughly 51 per cent of all private reserve land in the state. A French priest pulled down the original chapel in 1876 and spent seven years replacing it with a neo-Gothic church, French in its lines and built out of the mountain it stands on; it was consecrated on 27 May 1883, and electric light reached the place ten years after that. The wolves are far more recent. Through 1982 the staff kept finding the bins turned over and assumed dogs, until the superior pointed out that dogs do not climb the serra, and one pair has been coming up to the church for a tray ever since, visible together only in April and May, with five the most ever counted at once. Around 70,000 people come each year and 20,000 stay the night, which is what the wait actually requires, because day visiting shuts at five.