Igatu

You approach Igatu along a dirt road that the dry season turns to fine red powder — it coats everything, the bushes, the car, the back of your throat — and the village announces itself not with people or noise but with stone walls. They appear suddenly in the scrub: low, hand-fitted, the rough quartzite that the diamond era workers used because it was everywhere underfoot. Then more walls, and then you realize you are looking at the skeleton of a city, or what was once meant to be one.

Igatu was a prosperous mining settlement in the nineteenth century, when garimpeiros flooded the area chasing diamonds from the river gravels and the plateau’s quartz veins. At its peak it held several thousand residents, enough to justify churches, a pharmacy, substantial stone houses built in the Portuguese colonial manner with thick walls and internal courtyards. Then the diamonds ran out, as they always do. The people left. The roofs, which had been wood and thatch, decayed and fell. The walls, which were stone, stayed. What remains is a landscape of roofless rooms, doorways framing open sky, courtyards colonized by cerrado scrub and occasionally by a single, defiant fig tree forcing its roots between the stones.

There are still perhaps two hundred people living in Igatu — concentrated in the newer part of the village above the ruins, where painted cement houses replace the stone — and the inhabited and abandoned sections exist in an easy adjacency that seems particular to small Brazilian towns. A woman hangs laundry from a window fifty metres from a ruin where a century-old mango tree grows through what was once someone’s living room. Children play football in a cleared space between two roofless walls. The ruins are not fenced off or turned into a museum. They are simply present, part of the village’s ongoing life, which is either melancholy or pragmatic depending on your disposition.

The canyon of the Rio Piabas runs below the village and is accessible by a trail that drops steeply through the ruins and then through gallery forest to the river. The water here runs clear over pale quartzite, and there are pools deep enough to swim in. I swam in one on a hot afternoon while a pair of kingfishers worked the shallows downstream and the canyon walls above me were the colour of dried blood. The contrast between the ruin above and the river below — one thing emptied of life, another full of it — made for a peculiar afternoon’s thinking.

The pousada I stayed in was run by a man named Dão who had lived in Igatu his entire life and whose grandmother had been born in one of the houses that is now a ruin. He served breakfast on a covered terrace with a view across the ruins to the plateau beyond and spoke about the place without sentimentality, the way people do when history is not abstract but something that happened to their family. He recommended the trail to the canyon and told me which pool to swim in. I was the only guest.

When to go: June through September — the ruins are striking in the dry season light, the canyon trail is passable, and the river pools are swimmable. In the wet season the trail to the canyon can flood and the ruins feel less photogenic under heavy cloud. Igatu is a full day or overnight from Lençóis; combined well with the Cachoeira da Fumaça approach trail which passes nearby.