Qualla: Grande Sertão Veredas National Park

Grande Sertão Veredas National Park: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Louize lopes de lima, CC BY-SA 3.0. Brazilian conservation decrees are dry documents, full of hectares and boundary coordinates and the names of federal agencies. The decree that created Grande Sertão Veredas National Park on 12 April 1989 contains all of that, and then it says something unusual: one of the park's purposes is to preserve the streams and the landscape described in João Guimarães Rosa's novel Grande Sertão: Veredas. A country wrote a piece of literature into its statute book and fenced off 230,853 hectares of savanna to keep the book's setting alive.

Image: Louize lopes de lima | CC BY-SA 3.0

Grande Sertão Veredas National Park: Riobaldo's Country

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vitor S Borges, CC BY-SA 4.0. Guimarães Rosa published the novel in 1956, and it did to Portuguese roughly what Joyce did to English — invented words, folded syntax, a voice that will not sit still. The whole book is one unbroken monologue: Riobaldo, an old former jagunço, telling a visiting city man about hi...

Image: Vitor S Borges | CC BY-SA 4.0

Grande Sertão Veredas National Park: What a Vereda Is

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vitor 1234, CC BY-SA 3.0. The word in the title is the key to the landscape. A vereda is a wetland strip that forms where the water table meets the surface at the foot of a sandstone slope, and in the cerrado it announces itself from a great distance: a narrow, brilliant green ribbon running through dry, ...

Image: Vitor 1234 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Grande Sertão Veredas National Park: Tables of Sandstone

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thpelin, CC BY-SA 3.0. Between the veredas the terrain rises into broad sandstone plateaus, flat-topped and covered in savanna vegetation, with the drainages tucked into the lower ground between them. Elevation across the park runs from about 660 to 900 metres — not dramatic in numbers, but enough that...

Image: Thpelin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Grande Sertão Veredas National Park: Headwaters of the Carinhanha

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rog 800, CC BY-SA 3.0. The park exists partly to protect a river most Brazilians could not place on a map. The Carinhanha rises here, along with its tributaries the Itaguari, the Mato Grande, the Preto and the Canabrava, and it feeds the São Francisco — the great north-flowing river that irrigates and ...

Image: Rog 800 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Grande Sertão Veredas National Park: The Animals Rosa Wrote Around

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. The species list reads like an inventory of everything the cerrado is losing. Maned wolves, jaguars, cougars, ocelots and the small spotted colocolo all hunt here. Marsh deer wade the veredas. Giant anteaters cross the open ground; giant armadillos and the Brazilian three-banded ...

Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0