The name shortened as the place changed shape: military division, then Freguesia de São Miguel de Sétima Divisão, then Vila de Jequitinhonha, then simply Jequitinhonha, a municipality in its own right from 1911. None of that was the beginning. The Maxakali were here before the garrison, in a valley the Portuguese crown regarded chiefly as a mineral prospect to be secured, and the sequence of official names records only one side of what happened on this bend of the river. What the crown was securing, in the end, was a belief. The garrison's name and its date have survived; a diamond industry on this stretch of the river never did.

The Jequitinhonha rises near Serro in the highlands of central Minas Gerais and runs 1,090 kilometres to the Atlantic at Belmonte, in Bahia. Brazilians divide its valley into three: the Alto, closest to Belo Horizonte and best off by most measures; the Médio; and the Baixo, the downstream stretch reaching toward the Bahian border, where this town sits at 228 metres above sea level. The municipality covers 3,514 square kilometres — larger than several countries — and held 24,007 people at the 2022 census. Belo Horizonte is 690 kilometres away, which in practice means the state capital is somewhere you go rarely and for a reason.

The Vale do Jequitinhonha is known nationally for two things, and the interesting one is the ceramics. It began as economics. Men left to find work, in São Paulo and the cane fields and wherever else the wages were, and the women who stayed made pots, pans and vessels out of river clay to sell at the regional fairs. By the 1970s the work had turned into something else entirely: animals, and then figures, and then whole populations of clay people. Isabel Mendes da Cunha's tall, still, wide-eyed women became some of the most recognisable ceramic sculpture in the country, work with an author's signature on it rather than a craft label. Pasmadinho, a hamlet in Itinga, is among the places most identified with the tradition. These are artists with bodies of work and reputations that travel, and the pieces should be looked at that way — not as evidence of anything, just as good.

The hardship in the valley has a date on it. In the nineteenth century, South African diamonds reached the European market more cheaply than Brazilian ones, the price collapsed, and an economy built on stones stopped working. Nothing of comparable value replaced it. Roughly 50,143 square kilometres and, as of 2010, close to a million people live with the consequences: an economy leaning on livestock, small-scale mining, granite and gemstones, worth about 1.8 billion reais in 2011, which came to 1.4 percent of the state's output. Eucalyptus plantations have spread across the highlands and brought their own arguments about water. Out-migration for work is the oldest habit in the valley, and it is the reason the clay ended up in the hands of the women who made it famous.

The climate here is classified semi-arid, and everything about local agriculture is an answer to that. Cattle range the dry ground. Subsistence plots take what the rains give. Where irrigation reaches the riverbank, bananas grow commercially, alongside coconut, mango, cachaça and honey — a list of things that either tolerate drought or sit close enough to the water not to care. Away from the farmland, the municipality holds most of the 50,890-hectare Mata Escura Biological Reserve, created in 2003 and fully protected. And the town keeps its own calendar: Carnival, seriously observed, with blocos including the Kambaliandos; the June festivals; and the anniversary of the city itself, which is to say the anniversary of an ensign who came looking for diamonds and found a river.