Viva os Inconfidentes!

I’m not sure if you can really say that (meaning the title of this piece) in Portuguese, but the Inconfidentes are these guys who tried to rebel against the Portuguese oppressors back in the 18th Century. The town is named after one of the leaders of the movement, which by the way, never really got off the ground. His name, Tiradentes,  roughly translates to “tooth-puller”.

I don’t have any crazy elevator stories or really any misadventures to report about our 3.5 day trip to Tiradentes, which in some ways makes it a little hard to write about. We visited a lovely region in the Brazilian interior, had an amazing hotel, and mostly just took it easy.

It’s a six-plus  hour drive to Tiradentes, so we were happy to be able to get out of town on Friday, mid-day, on a long holiday weekend. The drive alone was spectacular with beautiful, green hills rolling by as we cruised through Sao Paulo state into Minas Gerais.

Minas is a huge state, slightly larger than France, and it’s the bread basket of Brazil as far as I can tell. Most of the best cheeses come from this area and it is renown for its cuisine. (Though I shocked at least one waiter by asking what specialties were available without beans. Oh, if only I liked them.) The state’s name translates exactly to “General Mines” which is a reflection also of the mineral wealth that originally brought the Portuguese there.

Based mostly on a NYTimes article, and my oddly prescient statement two days earlier that I thought we should explore Minas, we decided to spend our holiday weekend in Tiradentes. We had grand plans too of exploring some of the surrounding countryside including Ouro Preto, Mariana and Diamantes. We quickly abandoned these plans when we realized how nice our hotel was.

On the spur of the moment, we booked Pousada dos Inconfidentes, which like so many hotels in Brazil was pricey. It was the first, though, where I felt like we actually got our money’s worth. It was about 3.5 km outside of town, which we weren’t sure at first was a good thing, but we came to enjoy peaceful ambiance away from the chaos of the touristy (but quaint!) Tiradentes.

My first real introduction to Tiradentes came as we were driving to dinner, or I should say, as I was driving to dinner. Tooling along, trying to find the right street (with Ken’s help), I suddenly slammed into (onto?) what could be called cobblestones, but would be more aptly titled cobble-rocks. It turned out that most of the old town’s streets were “paved” with these huge rocks that made it feel way more like off-roading than like driving on cute little cobblestones.

The town itself rises from an ancient train station up a hill and culminates in a beautiful church, Igreja Matriz de Santo Antonio. Like the myriad of churches we visited in the region, its interior was richly decorated in gold. And, also like many of the regional churches had touches of the famous Aleijadinho, whose humble beginnings belied the beauty of his design and sculpture.

For sure, the monuments of note in the area are the churches. We saw several churches, but certainly not all of them, during our days of touring Tiradentes, and its nearby, bigger (and more tired) neighbor, Sao Joao del Rei. In Tiradentes, we saw the spectacular church that slaves built at nighttime, Igreja Nossa Rosario dos Pretos, and the more modern but still interesting, Sanctuaria de Santissima Trinidadade.

The latter was interesting because it is a pilgrimage site, largely due to the miracles performed when her Santissima Trinidade is called into action. A boy was saved from being run over by a a huge wagon, and a man survived being dragged by his horse, the man’s foot being stuck in the stirrup while the horse galloped wildly away. We decided that if you could manage to yell out “Santissma Trinidade” before something bad happened, then indeed it was a miracle!

And then the next day, hoping to arrive in Sao Joao del Rei by what turned out to be the temporarily inoperable mountain train locally called Maria Fumaca (Smoking Mary), we drove to the unbelievable Igreja de Sao Francisco de Assis. It is a bit like a wedding cake of stone, with complex sculpture inside and out, and a lovely historic cemetery at its back.

So, I hesitate to go into too much detail about the churches, though it is tempting. We capped off our last night with a visit to the inventive and whimsical Tragaluz for our best meal in quite some time. I’m still dreaming about my dessert of  Cachaca and Lime custard. I truly wanted to steal the physical menu, it was so cute and creative.

All ready to wrap this up, I realize I haven’t mentioned the duplicity of Minas Gerais. Many of the cities mysteriously have streets with two names. Is that just to make it hard on tourists, or is there some more plausible historic explanation? And, I discovered that I had to learn a whole new vocabulary to navigate the menus…feijao (beans) somehow became tutu and galina or frango (chicken) transformed into pintado. Minas was clearly a region that merited more than a few days. I can’t wait to go back, it was quite charming.

Advertisement