The story starts in 1909, at a bar beside the railway station kept by a woman named Maria Paulina. She sold a sweet to passengers waiting for trains, and the recipe her family used was not the one most of Brazil knows. Elsewhere pé-de-moleque means peanuts bound in caramelised sugar. In Piranguinho it means peanuts bound in rapadura — unrefined whole cane sugar, boiled down and set, darker and more mineral than caramel, tasting faintly of molasses and smoke. That distinction is the whole business. More than a century later, families in the town still make it in open pans, and the state of Minas Gerais formally recognised the artisanal method as intangible cultural heritage in 2009, the same year Piranguinho took the title it now paints on its signs: National Capital of Pé de Moleque.

Piranguinho exists because of a railway that needed wood. In the late nineteenth century, under the empire of Dom Pedro II, coffee money was financing track across Minas Gerais under the banner of the Rede Mineira de Viação, and one planned line was to link Itajubá with Santa Rita do Sapucaí. The land it crossed belonged to Baroness Leocádia de Lourenço, and the forest on it held exactly what the engineers needed: jacarandá, jequitibá, taiúva, pereira — hardwoods dense enough to make railway sleepers that would not rot. A deal was struck. The Baroness would cut and supply the timber, recruit the labour, straighten the course of the Ribeirão dos Porcos, and build a water-powered sawmill to process it all. Construction is believed to have begun in the 1880s. Workers came for the wages, put up houses of wood and pau-a-pique around the mill, and stayed. That cluster of sawmill housing is the town. Piranguinho did not become a municipality in its own right until 1963.

The town lies in the valley of the Sapucaí river, in the green folds of southern Minas between the Mantiqueira range and the São Paulo border, where the climate stays mild most of the year and the mornings come up with mist in the low ground. BR-459 and MG-295 cut the town into sectors and carry most of what passes through. Anyone driving in on the MG-295 should note the speed camera at the urban boundary and the 40 km/h limit it enforces, a detail the town considers important enough to publish. It is that kind of place: small, specific, entirely certain about its own rules.

The festival calendar gives Piranguinho its shape. Rodeos run at the Centro Regional de Rodeio Paulo Max in each half of the year. July belongs to Santa Efigênia, the town's patron saint, and to the Catholic festa held in her name. But June is the one that draws the crowds — three days of music, dancing, regional cooking and, at the centre of it, the slow theatrical business of boiling rapadura and pouring it over peanuts while several thousand people watch. Roughly seventeen thousand visitors turned up for the 2025 edition. When the measuring is done and the number is announced, the record is immediately destroyed: the candy is broken into pieces and eaten. Next year the town starts again, and tries to add a metre.