Paranapiacaba

Fog rolls through the valley like a living thing, swallowing the wooden cottages and the rusted railway iron until the village feels suspended between centuries and continents. The station clock appears and vanishes. Two thousand five hundred millimetres of rain fall here in an average year, and 415 of them arrive in January alone.

Paranapiacaba sits on top of the Serra do Mar escarpment, thirty kilometres from the centre of Santo André, and the São Paulo Railway built it in the nineteenth century for the staff running the Santos to Jundiaí line. The fabric is timber, British-pattern cottages on cobbled streets, with the yard below them holding the station and its clock, the bridge between the upper and lower village, the Locobreque, the workshops and forge, and the way into the Museu do Funicular. Football has a claim here as well: Charles Miller's father worked for the same company, and in 1894, the year Miller came back from England with balls, boots and the rulebook, the railwaymen's Serrano Athletic Club opened a pitch that was the first in Brazil laid out to official dimensions. Heritage listing covers the whole village at three levels of government, which is why filming it or bringing a photographer in for the day needs written permission from the town hall. Arrival can be part of it: CPTM's heritage train runs at weekends from Estação da Luz, 48 kilometres in ninety minutes behind a rebuilt 1950s locomotive.