Cáceres

Cáceres announced itself, on the overnight bus from Cuiabá, as a smudge of lights on the west side of the Paraguay River, and when I disembarked at five in the morning into hot dark air that smelled of water and diesel and something vaguely grassy — the river, I think, or the floodplain beyond it — the town felt immediately like a place that had not arranged itself for anyone’s convenience but its own. The praça was deserted at that hour except for a drunk man sleeping on a bench with a cat on his chest, and the cat watched me cross without concern, and I found the guesthouse I’d booked by the smell of its courtyard garden — jasmine, I think — before I could read the sign.

The city was founded in 1778, making it one of the older settlements in Mato Grosso, and its historic centre has the slightly weathered dignity of a town that was important once, subsided, and found a kind of second life in its own indifference to being important again. The Igreja de Nossa Senhora da Purificação — the main church, facing the praça — is a modest colonial structure painted the yellow of old paper, surrounded by orange trees that drop fruit on the paving stones in season and scent the whole square with something between sweet and bitter. Sitting under those trees in the late afternoon, with a glass of cold caldo de cana pressed from the sugar cane cart across the road, is one of those small completions that travelling sometimes produces and that I have never found a better word for than right.

The Festival Internacional de Pesca de Cáceres happens in October and draws a particular crowd: serious fishermen, families who have been coming for years, and a Brazilian-Bolivian mix of river people who understand dourado as a culinary and sporting obsession the way other cultures understand football. The festival fishes the Paraguay River in a stretch that runs through and around the city, and the competition is genuine — prizes are real, rivalries are sustained, and the fish count at the end of each day is announced with ceremony. I went as a civilian spectator and spent two days eating fried dourado on the riverbank and listening to arguments about depth and bait that I could only half follow but found profoundly interesting.

What Cáceres lacks in tourist infrastructure it makes up for in being a place that is actually lived in by people who are not thinking about you. The morning market near the river sells vegetables and dried river fish and homemade rapadura and the kind of conversation that happens between people who have been buying and selling from each other for twenty years. The restaurants serve grilled and fried fish — the preparations are not elaborate — but the rawness of the river fish pulled from the Paraguay at this latitude and cooked within hours is a quality that no elaboration could improve. I ate grilled pintado every night for four nights and it was different each time, depending on the cook and the fire and the wind direction, and none of it was less than excellent.

When to go: July through October for dry-season access and the festival in late October. The Paraguay River is navigable year-round but road access to the surrounding Pantanal is easiest in the dry months. Avoid the peak of the wet season (January to March) when the roads flood. The festival draws crowds in October — book accommodation three to four weeks ahead.