Chapada Diamantina

There is no gate to go through and nobody to pay. There is also no phone signal, no signage on the trails and stretches where the path is barely marked, which is why the park's own advice is to hire a guide, tell someone where you are going and walk with company. What that buys is almost three hundred kilometres of trail through Atlantic forest, cerrado and caatinga inside a single park.

The Parque Nacional da Chapada Diamantina takes in 152,000 hectares of the Serra do Sincorá, the Serra do Espinhaço's northern tip, and holds 33 waterfalls, two caves, ten climbing sites, sixteen historic sites and the Marimbus, a flooded plain known as the Pantanal of the Chapada that people paddle from Lençóis. The Cachoeira da Fumaça is the one they come for: roughly 380 metres from the point the water goes over to its neck, and as much as 420 from the top to the pool where the ground allows. Reaching the top of it means five kilometres from the village of Campos in the Vale do Capão, about two hours, an hour of that climbing steeply. Andaraí has the Cachoeira do Ramalho, ninety metres of free fall six kilometres in, which can dry out in a year without rain, and Ibicoara has the Véu de Noiva, three kilometres in and more than thirty metres down. Six towns give onto the park through 38 entrance trails, the administration sits in Palmeiras, and on the multi-day crossings the Vale do Pati is the one place you sleep in a house instead of a tent.