What to Expect
What It’s Like on the Ground
There are a few things that don’t change on a GOGO trip: long days outside, wood-fired meals, time in small communities, and very few other travelers.
However you choose to travel with us, the core stays the same: original routes, founders in the field, active days, honest comfort, and a level of immersion that’s hard to find elsewhere.
“… More adventure each day than most people have their whole lives.”
- Neil Bolton, Traveler
Near Dorico’s house. Vale do Rio Preto (October)
Motion-filled days
If you’re here to get outside and actually experience the landscape, you’re in the right place. The Espinhaço is a wonderland for active travelers, and our crossings are built to make the most of it.
It’s not just that trekking, riding, overlanding, and paddling are some of the most fulfilling ways we know to move through a place—they’re often the only ways to get from point A to point B in the range.
If you’re joining us on a Bespoke Trip, activities, pace, and daily mileage will be tuned to your group’s preferences.
If you’re joining one of our Expeditions or a Journey, you should expect long, highly active days—often with 15–25 km on foot or horseback and significant elevation change over varied mountain terrain.
Arriving in good physical condition is always a good idea, but you don’t need to be a seasoned trekker or elite athlete to enjoy our trips. In our experience, the travelers who thrive here are those who like a challenge, are curious about the world around them, and enjoy living each day fully.
Trail Conditions (October)
Empty trails
Three centuries of movement. Years of rediscovery.
The Espinhaço backcountry is a hidden world, and its labyrinth of little-used trails is the key. We’ve spent years exploring, documenting, and guiding along these paths—linking peaks, villages, waterfalls, and valleys—and most days we have them almost entirely to ourselves.
Outside a handful of state parks (which can fill up with locals on certain weekends and holidays), it’s rare to meet other folks on the trail.
Expect to spend long stretches on your own, moving through landscapes that feel largely untouched.
All to ourselves. Sempre Vivas (April)
Few other international travelers
Few places on earth are remarkable enough to earn even a single UNESCO designation. The Espinhaço has three: the World Heritage city of Diamantina, the Serra do Espinhaço Biosphere Reserve, and a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System recognition for sempre-vivas flower pickers.
Despite that, it remains virtually anonymous, even within Brazil.
Part of that anonymity comes from the fact that Brazil itself is dramatically under-visited, receiving far fewer international visitors—just six million in 2023—than you might expect for a country of its size and richness. Even within that context, the Espinhaço is an outlier. Far from the country’s major cities and coastline, the range has always required a journey simply to reach, let alone to explore.
It’s a privilege to experience a place like this as it is, right now.
Where we go →
Morning Shower / spiritual Experience
Daily waterfall baths
Take it from us: attempting to count the waterfalls of the Espinhaço is an exercise in futility.
Just as futile: trying to spend consecutive days on the trail without bathing in one.
We typically cross paths with at least one named falls per day—and sometimes many more—from quiet, cola-colored cascades to show-stopping, white-sand-beach masterpieces, and everything in between.
Ice-cold has never felt so good.
The Road to Mozart’s House. (September)
Saddle time
Through the hinterlands.
Horses have been part of life in the Espinhaço for centuries, and they remain one of the most memorable ways to move through the range.
The ridgelines southeast of Diamantina are welcoming even for first-time riders, while the river valleys and open roads of the Sertão and Berço offer more room to work for those with experience.
On Expeditions and Journeys, riding days are often optional and may double as rest days. On Bespoke trips, they can be a single highlight or the backbone of the itinerary.
Fording the Rio Pardo. (September)
Exhilarating backroads
Part quest, part commute.
Vehicles have always been part of how we move through the Espinhaço. They allow us to cover distance, connect trailheads, and reach communities that would otherwise take days to access.
On Bespoke trips, overlanding often shapes the journey—more villages, more stops, and the option to get out and walk when it makes sense.
Travel by vehicle here has its own edge: rough roads, water crossings, and long stretches where the journey is as much the point as the destination.
Cave Camping, Sempre Vivas (October)
A night in the wild
Pousadas and homestays connect us to the culture of the range, but it wouldn’t be a GOGO trip without at least one night that feels further out.
We prefer soft sand, warm fires, and gently rolling streams, but we’re just as at home in the quiet of the mountains.
Simple wilderness campsites are often highlights of our Expeditions and Journeys: tents pitched under starlit skies, a fire going, boots drying nearby, and the sounds of the Cerrado at night.
On Bespoke trips, camping is optional. If sleeping out in the elements isn’t your idea of a good time, there are plenty of ways to stay in village houses and small inns and still feel far from everyday life.
Maria & Santo’s House. (April)
Unforgettable homestays
Doorways into the world around us.
The trails will challenge you, and the peaks and waterfalls will leave you in awe, but in our experience it’s the time spent breaking bread with local families, often well into the night, that provides the most memorable moments of a trip. It’s hard to come away unmoved by the rustic conditions and the welcoming spirit of the households we visit.
Good company, unique accommodations, and home-cooked meals are reason enough to remember these nights. It also matters that our stays provide meaningful income for families whose livelihoods have shifted with the decline of mining, and help sustain a culture rooted in the region’s history, languages, and landscapes.
We sleep in all sorts of memorable places, from historic inns and simple ranches to remote refuges and wilderness camps. Years from now, it’s likely the homestays that will still come to mind.
Janta! Capivarí
Rustic wood-fired meals
Tropeiro. Torresmo. Frango com quiabo.
If you’re unfamiliar with comida mineira (the much-loved regional cuisine of Minas Gerais), you will be by the end of the trip—and Brazilians everywhere will be jealous. In the Espinhaço, angu, freshly baked quitandas, and queijos cured just around the bend sit alongside Brazilian standards: rice, beans, locally grown fruits and vegetables, and locally raised meats.
However you choose to travel with us, we’ll arrive again and again to generous plates of wood-fired, home-cooked meals, with more refined menus waiting in Diamantina and a few other front-country towns.
There are almost always ice-cold beers within reach—Kaiser, Antarctica, and whatever else the local bar is proud of—plus a splash of cachaça here and there “for digestion.”
Most of us abandon our weight-loss goals by about day three.
It’s worth it.
Luzimar. (July)
Welcoming people
Minas Gerais is Brazil’s heartland, and mineiros (the state’s residents) are its natural hosts.
Easy-going, down-to-earth, famously chatty, and never far from a good cup of coffee or cachaça, they set the tone for life here.
We don’t usually see big crowds on our trips, but the people you do meet are likely to be mineiros: farmers, flower pickers, entrepreneurs, cowboys, homestay hosts, and kids on their way to or from school.
It’s hard to find a more welcoming group anywhere in Brazil.
Bar dos Mestres. (July)
Joyous evenings
We believe life should be celebrated after the sun goes down, especially when the days are as demanding and exhilarating as they tend to be on our crossings. You won’t find a more willing group of celebrators than the inhabitants of the Espinhaço’s small backcountry communities.
Community festas, especially around holy days in August and September, are their own high-spirited universe. The smaller the town, the bigger the festa. In our experience, though, nothing is more satisfying than breaking bread, raising a glass, and sharing long conversations with the people who host us each night.
The journey is long, and the high-savannah night sky has a way of settling in.
Here’s to all of it, and to life in the Serra do Espinhaço.
Long Day. Solange’s House
Well-earned sleep
We’ve learned that the more ambitious the crossing, the more glorious the sleep. Travelers on our Journeys and Expeditions should expect plenty of quality rest, regardless of how remote the place is where you put your head down.
There’s nothing quite like a demanding day on the trail, followed by a good meal, a bit of celebration, and a hot wood-fired shower, to put your mind at ease and your body at rest.
Even when creature comforts are simple, you may find you’ve rarely slept so deeply or so easily.
vesperata! Diamantina (April)
A Vesperata
Every so often, the range reminds you that Brazil isn’t just quiet trails and kitchen tables.
In Diamantina, that reminder has a name: Vesperata, a nighttime, open-air concert where historic streets turn into an amphitheater and the hometown band plays from balconies above. Down on the cobblestones, people from across Minas and beyond sit at small café tables, talk over one another, and look up.
Samba, bossa nova, and Música Popular Brasileira (MPB) are staples here, along with the occasional Beatles cover and sing-along wedding-band tune that everyone somehow knows the words to.
We can’t promise a Vesperata on every departure. The calendar belongs to the town, not to us. When it does line up, it’s one of the most memorable nights we know: a UNESCO World Heritage city, a sea of brass and voices, and the sense that the whole range has come out to say boa noite before you go.
There isn’t a party on earth where we’d rather celebrate the final night of a trip.
