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We leave Caraca after a brisk early morning walk watching the fog lift out of the valley. As we return to the monastery, dark clouds come in reversing the clearing of two hours earlier. We depart the mountains, heading to Ouro Preto. Along the way we pass a large, denuded, grey valley, Brazil's largest environmental disaster. Two years ago a dam broke, releasing toxic wastewater from a mining company. It flooded the valley, wiping out a town, the forest, killing a river completely, and of course everything dependent on that ecosystem. No remediation is possible; it is destroyed now for a couple hundred years.
By contrast, we visit Ouro Preto, a UNESCO historical site, the first in Brazil. This area is known for its gold mining, dating back centuries. "Ouro Preto" means "black gold". In the height of mining in the mid-1800s, Ouro Preto was the most populated city on Earth, larger than New York City. Today it is a well preserved tourist destination, with strict historical preservation regulations. There are 13 Catholic churches, built by wealthy families who wanted to outdo each other. We visited two. One was covered in gold leaf (134 kilos) in the Baroque style, dating from 1711-1733, described by one author upon entering as a "wave of gold". The second was built by slaves for slaves, during the late 1700s during an anti-slavery, anti-Portuguese insurgency. Brazil had the highest number of slaves in the Americas and only abolished slavery in 1888. Slaves originated from Benin, Ghana and Togo where people were skilled and of small stature to work more easily in the mines. We visited slave quarters (i.e. prison) with artifacts of enslavement.
A long lunch was in a nice restaurant, then we continued on to Belo Horizonte where the nine of us continuing on the extension checked into a modern hotel (culture shock) and the other four plus Willy went on to the airport.
- comments
Tracey Wow so interesting and SOOOO sad about the dam break/toxic waste and NO remediation. Uggh. Thanks for sharing all of this really interesting.