Diamantina

Sixteen Saturdays a year the concert is above your head. Bands take the balconies and windows of the casarões along Rua da Quitanda, the street fills up underneath them, and that is the Vesperata, which runs from April to October and nothing like it happens in the other Minas colonial towns. For the other eleven months Diamantina is a steep grid of stone lanes in the Serra do Espinhaço, 'a colonial city nestled like a jewel within a necklace of inhospitable rocky mountains' in UNESCO's own words.

Prospectors found gold in the Tijuco valley in 1713 and diamonds in 1720, and everything here was built on the second discovery. IPHAN listed the architectural and urban ensemble in 1938; UNESCO inscribed it in 1999 as site 890, sixty-one years later. The town sits inside the Espinhaço Range Biosphere Reserve, designated in 2005, 10.2 million hectares running about 1,200 kilometres from Belo Horizonte to the Bahia border, whose high ground carries rupestrian grasslands with roughly 3,000 plant species. Juscelino Kubitschek was born here and grew up at Rua São Francisco 241, in a house of pau a pique, wattle and daub, which is a strange place for a man who would later raise a capital city out of empty cerrado; his guitars are still in it. Down at Praça Barão do Guaicuí the 1835 market that Tenente Joaquim Cassimiro Lage, a Black merchant, built to receive the tropeiros and their pack animals is now a cultural centre, and still holds a feira on Saturday mornings.