São José dos Ausentes

São José dos Ausentes means Saint Joseph of the Absent Ones, and the town is named for landowners who stayed away. What came instead were tropeiros driving cattle across the Campos de Cima da Serra and Jesuits off the Missões, and what they left behind are the colossal dry-stone corrals out in the grass, among the oldest structures in Rio Grande do Sul. The town holds the state's north-eastern corner, with the walls of the Aparados da Serra between it and Santa Catarina.

The high point of Rio Grande do Sul is here. Pico do Monte Negro reaches 1,403 metres on the lip of its own canyon, forty-three kilometres out on the Silveira road and close enough to drive to that the walk is short. Around it run something like a hundred kilometres of Serra Geral wall, cut into the Boa Vista, Cruzinha, Rocinha and Amola Faca canyons, the last of them carrying a waterfall down into the Rio Araranguá, and sea fog comes up the escarpment on most days of the year. The springs of the Rio das Antas and the Rio das Contas both rise in this municipality, the highest clear-water headwaters in the state, and at one spot two rivers run parallel with a single hill and eighteen metres of height between them. Out at Silveira the Museu Waldemar dos Santos Boeira keeps more than five thousand pieces from the first families here, beside a mounting stone the women used, a stone corral of unsettled age and a small graveyard whose origin nobody has yet fixed.