Qualla: Alfenas

Alfenas: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit INPE/OBT/DPI: Divisão de Processamento de Imagens, Coordenação Geral de Observação da Terra, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais, CC BY-SA 4.0. Minas Gerais has no coastline. It is the one thing everybody knows about the state: general mines, mountains, iron, the interior of the interior, as far from salt water as Brazil gets. Alfenas calls itself the gateway to the sea of Minas anyway, and it is not being ironic. A short drive north the land simply stops and water begins, and it keeps going — 1,440 square kilometres of it, reaching into 34 municipalities, with beaches and marinas and jet-skis and horizon. The sea of Minas is Lake Furnas, and it did not exist before 1963. Engineers built a dam on the Rio Grande, the reservoir filled the Sapucaí floodplains, and a coffee town that had spent a century looking at valleys woke up looking at water.

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Image: INPE/OBT/DPI: Divisão de Processamento de Imagens, Coordenação Geral de Observação da Terra, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais | CC BY-SA 4.0

Alfenas: The Sea That Engineers Made

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ernani Zimmermann, CC BY-SA 4.0. Filling a reservoir that size is not a neutral act. Farms went under. River towns that had grown along the floodplain found their best bottomland at the bottom of a lake, and families who had worked those fields for generations had to decide what to do with land that ended at a s...

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Image: Ernani Zimmermann | CC BY-SA 4.0

Alfenas: Coffee, All the Way Down

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bernardo2708, CC BY-SA 4.0. Before the lake and after it, Alfenas is a coffee city. Sixteen thousand hectares of the municipality are planted with it, on the hills of southern Minas that produce some of the most sought-after arabica in the world, and the Brazil Specialty Coffee Association keeps its headqua...

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Image: Bernardo2708 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Alfenas: A Name From Al-Andalus

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Valter Moraes, CC BY 3.0. The name arrived by a long route. Members of the Martins Alfena family were among the first settlers on this ground, and they carried a surname taken from Alfena, a town in northern Portugal. That Portuguese place name is itself Arabic — al-hinna, henna, the dye plant — left behi...

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Image: Valter Moraes | CC BY 3.0

Alfenas: The University Town

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Dej espindola at Portuguese Wikipedia., Public domain. Alfenas is a college town, which is unusual for a place of this size and explains a good deal about it. UNIFAL began in 1914 as a school of pharmacy and dentistry, spent most of the twentieth century as a specialist institution, and became a full federal university in 2005; enrol...

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Image: The original uploader was Dej espindola at Portuguese Wikipedia. | Public domain