Pirenópolis

Hooves on the Campo das Cavalhadas, lances up, a crowd three deep for a fight between Moors and Christians that sits inside a festival this town has kept since 1819. Out on the streets the mascarados are the ones in painted paper masks and clothes chosen to be looked at, and they are the noise. Outside those weeks Pirenópolis goes quiet: stone churches, silver benches, waterfalls in the hills behind town.

The town was founded in 1727 as Minas de Nossa Senhora do Rosário de Meia Ponte, a gold camp that peaked around 1750 and was worked out by 1800. What it did next is the interesting part. It turned to cotton and cattle, and in March 1830 it set up the first printing press in Goiás and began the Matutina Meiapontense, the first newspaper in the state and in the whole Centre-West, which ran to 526 editions by May 1834 in a place where five people in a hundred could read and a quarter were enslaved. Then the trade moved to Anápolis in the 1880s and the money went with it, which is precisely why the eighteenth-century streets are still standing; IPHAN listed the ensemble in 1989 and a restoration of the historic centre began in 1997. Outside it are the waterfalls of the Serra dos Pireneus, the Cachoeira do Abade among them, the Vagafogo wildlife sanctuary, and the Fazenda Babilônia twenty-five kilometres out, built by the man who founded the newspaper and once among the largest sugar mills in Brazil.