Andy HoffmanI woke up in the mountains of Brazil, in a small reconstructed colonial town called Tiradentes, named for an independence fighter who helped separate Brazil from the Portuguese aristocracy. His name – a nickname earned from his first profession – translates at tooth-puller. I suspect his dental skills came in handy in battle, but they did not save him from the vengeance of the King of Portugal, under whose authority he met his end: drawn and quartered for treason.
By strange coincidence, Ben Batchelder, the American brother-in-law of a friend, settled in Tiradentes almost 25 years ago. Ben wrote a fascinating book, To Belem and Back: Backroads Brazil with me Black Lab, a memoir of road trip through some wild corners of this fabulous country.He told us that when he first began coming to the part of Minas Gerais, a state in Brazil north and west of the state of São Paulo. Minas experienced a gold rush a century before California, but as the gold ran out so did the reason for towns like Tiradentes. A few of decades before Ben settled here, only a horse path connected the community to the rest of the country, an isolation that preserved much of the colonial architecture. As recently as 1990, guidebooks did not mention this place. It has since become a must-see destination, at least for urban Brazilians, and crowds with tourists on summer weekends.
Every day, we wake up to the sounds of birds calling into the clear blue sky. Our house sits on a hillside over the town, a neighborhood of a few hundred houses. Interestingly, many of the houses built even in recent years maintain the colonial style: white-washed plastered wall topped by terracotta tiles. Our house, at least the small original section, harkens to an older vintage, we think, but the newer parts – detectable in the steps between rooms – look the same as the older ones. The windows have both swinging shutters and glass panels and we start every morning opening the doors and windows to the fresh mountain air.
Perhaps it is only the clear air of Minas that allows us to sleep long beautiful hours in the dark and quiet nights. But Minas also produces vast amounts of food for the rest of Brazil. The cheese here, while not up to European or even US standards, has its simple country charm. On our way from the airport in Belo Horizonte, we passed by field after field of corn and cows. Minas, and Tiradentes in particular, has a reputation for the best food in Brazil; in the major cities restaurants proudly serve Mineira cuisine. A fundamental meal in Minas consists of grilled beef, rice, beans, angu (polenta or corn-meal mush), and stewed vegetables. We wake up hungry after our delicious sleep and breakfast on local fruit, local coffee, and fresh bread. I will write soon about the spectacular all-you-can-eat lunch we had in Bichinho, a nearby town colonized by craftspeople, but for the moment embrace, as Deb and I do, the magnificence of our sweet historic place and the breathtaking sierras surrounding us.