Cachoeiras Almécegas

My guide in Alto Paraíso mentioned the Almécegas waterfalls on the third day, when I’d already seen the Cariocas and done the São Jorge loop and was starting to feel that I’d covered the main circuit. He said it casually, the way someone might mention a restaurant they like in a city where you’ve eaten well at the famous places. He’d grown up near the trailhead and had been going to Almécegas since he was seven. He offered it as a suggestion rather than a recommendation, which in my experience is the surest sign that something is worth doing.

The trail from the highway outside Alto Paraíso descends through cerrado for about an hour before reaching Almécegas I — the smaller of the two falls, though smaller is relative here. It drops perhaps fifteen meters over a stepped quartzite face into a deep green pool circled by the red rock walls of a small canyon. The green of the water here is distinct from the turquoise of the more famous pools elsewhere in the Chapada — it has a depth to it that suggests the canyon’s shadows, the plant life at the pool’s edge, an ecology that gets less sun and more moisture. I swam in it for a long time. A family of coatis moved through the undergrowth on the far bank and ignored me with the completeness of animals that have determined humans are no longer interesting.

Almécegas II requires a further forty minutes downstream and a creek crossing that ranges from ankle-deep in dry season to chest-deep after rain. It is larger and more open than the first fall, the quartzite here spreading into wider shelves that receive more light and make the pool color shift toward the turquoise I recognized from the park’s main trails. Both falls have the quality of places that haven’t been photographed enough to exist as images in people’s minds before they arrive — which means you form your own first impression rather than comparing what you find to a picture you’ve already seen, and that difference is more significant than it sounds.

What I remember most clearly from the day at Almécegas is not either waterfall specifically but the walk back: the late afternoon light on the cerrado, the smell of the vegetation after a day in which a brief rain shower had passed through, the distant sound of thunder moving east. My guide walked ahead of me at the pace of someone who knows exactly where his feet need to go and has never needed to think about it. He stopped once to point at a bird I couldn’t identify — a medium-sized thing with a rust-colored tail, perched on a dead branch above us, watching us pass with apparent judgment. We stood there for a minute. Then it flew. Then we kept walking.

When to go: Almécegas I and II are best in the dry season (May–September) when the trail is stable and both pools are accessible. The creek crossing to Almécegas II can be impassable after heavy rain. The trail is less visited on weekdays — if you’re at all flexible, avoid Saturday and Sunday when local day-trippers from Alto Paraíso can fill the pools. A guide is recommended; the junction between the two trails is not obvious.