Chapada dos Veadeiros

The plateau is held up by quartzite, and the quartzite is Paleoproterozoic: the rift that laid these rocks down opened before 1.77 billion years ago, which puts them a long way ahead of Pangaea. People came here for the crystals that grew in its cracks. The Trilha Amarela now walks through what is left of their diggings, eleven kilometres there and back, to a viewpoint over a waterfall of 120 metres.

The park was created by decree on 11 January 1961 and covers 240,586 hectares of cerrado, and in 2001 UNESCO declared it a World Heritage site for its nature; since 2019 its public use has been run under federal concession by Parquetur. ICMBio's threatened-species list for this single unit reads like a roll call of the biome: maned wolf, jaguar, giant anteater, giant armadillo, the crowned solitary eagle and the Brazilian merganser. Nobody guides you round any of it. The five trails are self-guided, you set your own pace, and the only hard rule is that everybody is out of the attractions by six unless they are camping at Boa Sorte or Sete Quedas. The dry season runs May to October and the rains November to April, which sounds simple until you set it beside the fire record: a blaze that started inside the park near Vila de São Jorge on 25 September 2024 closed the whole place the next day, campers at Sete Quedas taken out by the concessionaire, after another fire had already taken 10,000 hectares that same month.