Miranda

Miranda sits on the Pantanal’s southern edge in a particular state of suspension between the working world of the ranches and the arriving world of the tourists. It is a small town — perhaps twenty-five thousand people, though the number feels generous when you walk the main street — and it wears its size with comfort rather than ambition. The one hotel with air conditioning was also the local pharmacy. The best breakfast in town came from a woman who set up a folding table outside her house at six every morning and sold nothing but tapioca crepes with queijo coalho and fresh guava jam. I ate there three days running and never spoke to anyone who wasn’t local.

The Terena people have lived in this part of the Pantanal for centuries, and their presence in Miranda is not historical — it is present tense. The Terena aldeia sits just outside town, and on the road between them women sell artesanato from plastic chairs: baskets woven from carandá palm in geometric patterns that I was told each carry specific meaning, though the woman who sold me one declined to explain which meaning mine carried and suggested I work it out. The basket is hanging in my room in Mexico. I am still working it out. The craftsmanship is extraordinary — tight and even and made to last generations, not gift shops.

Pantanal horse culture centres on Miranda in a way it doesn’t anywhere else on the southern approach. The fazendas around town offer horseback rides through the wetlands at dawn, and the guides — proper pantaneiros, third-generation ranch hands — have the particular ease with horses that comes from growing up alongside them. My guide Cícero rode with one hand on the reins for the first hour, the other holding his thermos of tereré, and pointed out things from the saddle with the stem of his erva-maté: a marsh deer half-hidden in the grass, a pair of maguari storks circling overhead, the distant pale shape of a giant anteater moving along the tree line. He narrated minimally and accurately.

The Miranda River runs through town in a state of seasonal fluctuation that shapes everything — when the water is high the streets near the bank flood, and residents move their furniture upstairs with the practised calm of people who have done this every year for their entire lives. When the water is low, as in July, the river reveals sandbars where black-collared hawks hunt and capybaras sleep in improbable pile-ups. The town accommodates both states without drama. It is the kind of place that has been absorbing whatever the river delivers for long enough that very little surprises it anymore.

When to go: June through September for horse riding, low water, and wildlife. July and August are peak dry season — the river reveals sandbanks, wildlife concentrates, and the temperature drops enough at night to make sleeping comfortable without air conditioning. The wet season (December to April) transforms the surrounding roads into mud and the fazendas become harder to reach.