Serra do Cipó

The forest stops and the campos rupestres start: low wiry flowering things with their roots in bare quartzite, many of them keeping their shape long after they have dried out. Water runs through all of it, over ledges and down into pools the colour of dark tea. The strange part is the arithmetic, because botanists have counted 3,299 plant species on this one stretch of mountain.

Serra do Cipó National Park protects 31,639 hectares of the southern Espinhaço, created by decree on 25 September 1984 and spread across Santana do Riacho, Jaboticatubas, Morro do Pilar and Itambé do Mato Dentro, roughly a hundred kilometres out of Belo Horizonte. Campos rupestres hold the high ground, forest follows the watercourses and the valleys carry something denser. The flora project run from the University of São Paulo has catalogued 3,299 land plant species here against 11,310 for the entire state, and the isolation of the high ground is the reason: species adapted to narrow bands of the Espinhaço and never left them. The park's symbol is a sempre-viva, whose flowers hold their form after drying, and nothing goes home in a pocket, since removing plants, stones or seeds is prohibited. The walking is longer than the names suggest, from four easy kilometres round the Circuito das Lagoas to sixteen for the Cachoeira da Farofa and twenty-four for the Cânion das Bandeirinhas, both measured there and back from the Portaria Areias.