Who We Meet
A Visual Guide to the People & Culture oF the Serra do Espinhaço and Minas Gerais
People are the heart of our trips.
The landscapes will reset your sense of scale, the waterfalls will leave you quiet in the best way, and the trails will give you plenty of reasons to celebrate each evening. But it’s the folks we meet and walk with along the way that make each journey so revealing. They’re also what make the Espinhaço such a warm and joyful place to explore.
Whether you join us on an Expedition, a Journey, or a Bespoke trip, you can be sure you’ll cross paths with mineiros from all walks of life — from miners and cowboys to farmers and flower pickers, horsemen and boatmen to innkeepers and home cooks. Some will walk with you for days. Others you may only meet once, at a doorway or around the kitchen table, and remember for years.
This page is a tribute to that wider fellowship: the people who live here, keep the stories, and welcome you into their world.
[Meet Our Crew →]
Cosme. Near São João da Chapada
i. Mineiros
Minas Gerais is Brazil’s heartland, and mineiros — the people who call it home — play the part of heartland hosts to a T. Easygoing, down-to-earth, famously chatty, and rarely far from good coffee or good cachaça, they’re to “friendly” what paulistas are to “fast-paced” and cariocas are to “carefree.”
You won’t see many crowds on our trips, but most of the folks you do meet — flower pickers, homestay hosts, drivers, guides, kids walking to school, musicians tuning up for a festa — will be mineiros. Generally speaking, you’d be hard-pressed to find a kinder, more welcoming bunch anywhere in Brazil.
Luzimar, near Pedrão
Lucas, Fazenda Santa Cruz
Levi. Taquaral
II. The Masters
Masters of the backcountry
Far from being props or token guides, the men and women who help us on crossings are lifelong residents of the Espinhaço, as well as our friends, mentors, and heroes. They’re the people we call mestres: horsemen, trackers, flower pickers, small farmers, boatmen, and backcountry dwellers who know these mountains the way most of us know our own houses.
They read weather from a single cloud and soil from the way it sticks to a boot. They also know which trail will still be passable after a week of rain, who lives behind each unmarked gate, and which stories are theirs to tell. When we venture into their world, we let them set the pace, choose the lines, and teach us how to see.
We Owls can navigate the surface of the Espinhaço all we want, but we can only go so deep into the Story of Brazil without the mestres.
Dorico, Vale do Rio Preto
Valdir, FAzenda Santa Cruz do Gavião
Luis. São Gonçalo do Rio das Pedras
III. Innkeeps
Keepers of the keys
The mestres show us how to move through the backcountry; the innkeepers show us how people actually live here.
Pousada owners, village hosts, and family matriarchs are the folks who open their doors to us at the end of a long day — laying out towels and blankets, lighting wood-fired stoves, filling tables, and making sure there’s hot water in the bathroom and coffee in the morning. Their homes and guest rooms are where you hear the local news, learn which festas are coming up, and feel how time passes in the Espinhaço when you’re not marching through the range on foot.
Rooms vary greatly on our trips — from simple to historic, polished to delightfully mismatched — but they’re rarely anonymous. Each has a story, a family, and a particular way of doing things. By the time you leave, you’ll know which corner of the table is best for breakfast and which room you’d request the next time you come back.
When it comes to home-cooked meals, we rarely make special requests. We want our hosts to serve the food they feel comfortable preparing — the food they’d be eating even if we weren’t at the table. Portions tend to be generous by nature, and travelers often cite meals as some of the most fulfilling highlights of their trip.
Many of the people cooking for us do so with great humility and care. With the arguable exception of Diamantina, the Espinhaço is not a wealthy region, nor does it receive much in the way of international tourism. For many of our hosts, cooking for a group of famished foreigners is both a rare treat and an occasion to be taken seriously. We consider it a privilege to break bread with them.
Dona Maria, Conselheiro mata
Deco, Couto de Magalhães
Ze, last of the Black River Valley residents
IV. Rural Brazil
Beyond the postcards
The vast majority of Brazilians live in cities now. Our trips cast a light on the lives of those who don’t.
The Espinhaço sits in the interior of Minas, far from Brazil’s famous beaches and big-city skylines. Out here, “the countryside” isn’t a weekend escape — it’s home.
During Expeditions and Journeys, we pass through dozens of communities, many of them rural. From quaint colonial hamlets to bucolic quilombola villages, festive cow towns to chic historic villas, mystical railway settlements to UNESCO World Heritage city Diamantina, each has its own character, setting, and reason for being. It’s remarkable how dramatically the cultural landscape can change in just a day’s walk.
Between river valleys and high plateaus you’ll find small towns, roadside hamlets, and clusters of farmhouses: places where laundry dries on lines in the wind, kids ride past on motorbikes, roosters set the alarm clock, and folks can trace their roots back through the same hills for generations. Mining booms and busts, droughts and floods, new roads and old trails have all left their marks, but the everyday rhythm is still shaped by weather, soil, and community.
Traveling through this side of Brazil means seeing more than scenery. You notice which crops are doing well, how people patch a roof, how many chairs are kept ready for visitors, which songs float out of the bar at night. It’s quieter than the clichés, and always more revealing.
Dona Maria’s House, São João da Chapada
V. Comunidades Quilombolas
Guardians of memory
Across the Espinhaço, you’ll find quilombola communities — Afro-Brazilian settlements whose roots go back to people who resisted enslavement and made new lives for themselves in the backcountry. Today, many of these villages still farm, mine for diamonds by hand, gather sempre vivas, and keep alive ways of speaking, cooking, celebrating, and caring for the land that might otherwise have been lost. Visiting them is both a highlight and a rare chance to reflect — on Brazil’s history, the rhythms of life in the Espinhaço, and the country’s diverse cultural landscape.
When our routes pass through quilombola territory (as they often do during Expeditions and Journeys), we do so with great reverence. Sometimes that means walking past backyards and chapels, stopping to talk in doorways and village squares, or sharing a meal cooked from what’s in the garden and the pantry. Other times it’s a longer stay, with stories about land rights, mining, and memory woven into the days.
These are not open-air museums, nor are they stages for consumable performances. They’re living communities, with their own internal politics, joys, and worries. We come as guests, contribute to local economies, dine with our hosts, converse with our neighbors, and try to leave more understanding — and more connected — than when we arrived.
Diego (Right) and Gilsinho, Quarteis do Indaia
Barbosa and Lúcia, Inhai
Street Scene, Sáo Gonçalo do Rio das Pedras
VI. Colonial-era Villages
Gems from a bygone era
Curralinho. Mendanha. Inhaí. Serro. São Gonçalo. Milho Verde.
If it starts to feel like all trails in the Espinhaço lead to bucolic, centuries-old mining towns, you’re not wrong. All along the range, tiny colonial-era towns and villages still carry the marks of the diamond and gold rushes: steep cobblestone lanes, whitewashed houses with bright doors, baroque churches, and squares built for processions, markets, and music.
UNESCO World Heritage city Diamantina rightly garners most of the attention, but the settlements around it are each their own small universe. From elegant São Gonçalo do Rio das Pedras and rustic Curralinho to postcard-perfect Capão Maravilha, somber Mendanha, festive Milho Verde, and almost-forgotten São João da Chapada, the region is full of historic mountain settlements, each with its own setting, secrets, and reasons for being.
We don’t visit these places as architectural checklists. We come to see how people are living in them now — how old mining taverns have become family homes, how new cafés sit beside centuries-old chapels, how history and everyday life overlap on the same stone steps. Few places bring travelers into the enchantment of the Espinhaço more quickly than a night in one of these villages.
New Friends, Cemetério do peixe
VII. Community Gatherings & Festivities
For much of the year, the Espinhaço can feel almost impossibly quiet. Then, suddenly, the whole range bursts with activity, music, and revelry.
In a country (Brazil) and a state (Minas) already famous for celebrating, the Espinhaço somehow manages to party harder. In small towns and villages, festas are how the year keeps time: saints’ days in August and September, harvest celebrations, patron festivals, wedding parties that spill into the street (the smaller the town, the bigger the festa). Unassuming praças and far-flung churchyards turn into open-air ballrooms: loudspeakers and bonfires, fireworks, food stalls, kids running laps, elders taking it all in from plastic chairs.
As travelers, we’re just lucky when our dates line up. During a festa junina, that might mean standing at the edge of a candlelit procession or nursing a beer by the barracas while a brass band plays. During a cavalgada, it can mean giant plates of food and dancing in the dust with people you met that afternoon. Find yourself in Diamantina during Carnaval and you may not find yourself at all — mineiros from across the state descend on town for a week of unrivaled revelry.
And then there is the Vesperata — Diamantina’s pride and joy, when the city band appears on the balconies above and turns the historic center into a concert hall. Out in the range, the festas are smaller and rougher around the edges, but the feeling is the same: you’ve stepped into something that was going to happen with or without you, and you’ve been allowed to stay.
João’s second Birthday Party, Burití do Claúdio
Festa das Almas, Cemetério do Peixe
If you’d like to meet some of these folks in person, see our 2026–27 trips →
