Conceição do Mato Dentro

Conceição do Mato Dentro has stood here more than three centuries, 166 kilometres out of Belo Horizonte on the Estrada Real. Behind it the Serra do Intendente holds 356 springs across 13,508 hectares of cerrado meeting Atlantic Forest, and everything that comes off the escarpment starts in one of them. The tallest of those falls is Tabuleiro, 273 metres in a single drop into a pool about twenty metres deep.

The mother church was begun in 1702, at the opening of the Minas gold cycle, listed by IPHAN in 1948, and shut for fifteen years before it reopened on 8 December 2018. The waterfall has had the harder decade. On 25 July 2026 a court, at the state prosecutor's request, closed everything within 500 metres of the fall, restricting the ground to specialists and maintenance teams on inspection duty and setting a fine of a thousand reais a day, on the grounds that the municipality had not put in place the weather, rainfall and seismic monitoring its agreement with the prosecutors required. What is open is the rest of it, and there is a lot of it: Rabo de Cavalo, Congonhas, Roncador and Mutambo, the Salão de Pedras municipal park with its pools and rapids, and the Travessia Lapinha to Tabuleiro across the Espinhaço. Every May the Largo do Rosário fills for the Festival Fartura, in its seventh edition on 22 to 24 May 2026, free to walk into, with the town's own producers selling alongside visiting cooks.