Lençóis

I got off the bus from Salvador at dusk, stiff and slightly dazed from seven hours on a road that alternated between smooth tarmac and something closer to a suggestion. Lençóis appeared out of the scrub like a film set — pastel colonial facades, a church on a small hill, the Rio Lençóis sliding amber through the center of town. A boy was fishing from a stone bridge. A woman was hanging laundry from a wrought-iron balcony. The air smelled of woodsmoke and something sweet I couldn’t identify, and by the time I reached the door of my pousada I had already decided to stay longer than I’d planned.

Lençóis was built on diamond money in the nineteenth century, when garimpeiros — wildcat miners — pulled precious stones from the riverbeds and hills around town and built themselves a provincial capital worthy of the wealth. The wealth left, eventually, as wealth tends to do, but the architecture stayed: the Igreja Nosso Senhor dos Passos on its modest rise, the Mercado Municipal with its peeling ochre walls, the stone-flagged streets narrow enough that two cars cannot pass without negotiating. The buildings are small-scaled, faded to beautiful, and the town wears its former grandeur like a well-loved old coat.

The market on Thursday mornings is the thing I keep returning to in memory. Dona Raimunda’s caldos, a woman whose feijão was the colour of dark chocolate and tasted of hours on a wood fire, of dried beef and bay and something I never identified but kept chasing. Around her, farmers sold dried cactus pads and blocks of rapadura sugar and sacks of farinha. The tourist restaurants on the main square are fine — capable, clean, slightly expensive. But the market is where Lençóis feeds itself, and sitting there on a plastic stool with a tin cup of thick coffee while the town moves around you is a better orientation to this place than any guidebook.

The trails begin where the streets end. You can walk from the center of town to Salão de Areia — a sandstone formation where colored mineral deposits streak the walls in ochre and burgundy — in twenty minutes. The Ribeirão do Meio is forty minutes upstream: a series of smooth quartzite slides worn by the river into natural chutes, where on weekends families come to toboggan into green pools below. I spent an afternoon there with a group of Brazilian teenagers who could not understand why I kept stopping to photograph the rock formations and who were entirely correct that the sliding was a better use of the afternoon.

The guides who work out of Lençóis are the town’s real infrastructure. Marcos, who walked the first trail with me on my first full day, communicated in Portuguese I barely followed and gestures I understood perfectly. He knew where the river ran clear even in late dry season, which hillside had the best view of the sunset, and whose house sold cold coconut water along the back route from Ribeirão do Meio. That knowledge — accumulated, local, generous — is what the town runs on more than anything the diamond rush left behind.

When to go: June through September, when the dry season keeps trails open and the waterfalls run full from the rains just ended. The town is busiest on long weekends when Brazilians arrive from Salvador and the coast — come mid-week for a quieter version. December and January bring heavy rain and the trails close; some years the river floods the lower streets.