The paperwork took its time catching up with the settlement. Provincial law nº 2.275, dated 18 December 1880, created the municipality; the first chamber of aldermen was installed in January 1883; city status followed on 4 October 1887. For its first four decades the place was Santo Antônio de Salinas, and it kept the saint until 7 September 1923, when the name was cut down to the two syllables everyone was already using. Today the municipality sprawls across roughly 1,862 square kilometres of northern Minas sertão, its seat sitting at 471 metres. The 2022 census counted 40,178 residents — a real town, with banks and hospitals and a bus station, but a small one, and a long way from anywhere that would call itself a city.

Cachaça is cane spirit, distilled from fresh pressed sugarcane juice rather than from molasses, and Brazilian regulators fixed its technical definition in 2005: to be sold under the name, it must be bottled between 38 and 48 percent alcohol by volume. Salinas was distilling long before anyone wrote that down. The reputation runs so deep that in the enormous folk lexicon of Portuguese nicknames for the drink — hundreds of them, comic, affectionate, evasive — 'salinas' is simply one of the words for cachaça itself. What is recent is the legal recognition rather than the fame. The 2018 statute turned an informal reputation into a formal title. The Museu da Cachaça, opened in 2012 with eight exhibition rooms, made that reputation something a visitor can walk through, and the Festival Mundial da Cachaça fills the streets when it comes around.

The climate here is semi-arid, and it does not negotiate. Average summer highs sit near 33 °C; even midwinter afternoons reach about 18 °C. Roughly 823 millimetres of rain fall in an average year, but almost none of it falls politely — a long severe dry season gives way to torrential, sporadic storms that arrive and leave in a hurry. The extremes are on record at both ends. Salinas hit 41.8 °C on 18 November 2023, and dropped to 3.7 °C on 18 June 1985. Sugarcane, oddly, thrives on this rhythm. Stressed cane concentrates its sugars, and the alternation of hard drought and sudden water is part of what the distillers here have spent generations learning to read.

Look at a map of this corner of Minas Gerais and the pattern is small towns strung thinly across a lot of empty ground. Salinas borders Taiobeiras, Rubelita, Santa Cruz de Salinas, Novorizonte, Fruta de Leite, Rio Pardo de Minas, and Comercinho — names that mean everything locally and nothing beyond the state line. Population density across the municipality runs to about 22 people per square kilometre, and roughly seven in ten of them live in the urban seat, which leaves the rest of that 1,862 square kilometres to cattle, cane, and some 35,000 hectares of woodland. The Rio Salinas, the same watercourse that gave the region its salt and its name, still runs through it. In a landscape this dry, the presence of a named river is not a small thing.

Away from the alambiques, the economy is what you would expect of the sertão. Cattle dominate — some 46,000 head were counted in 2006 — grazing across roughly 62,000 hectares of natural pasture. In the rural municipality, about 2,084 producers work some 111,541 hectares, with around 6,000 people employed in agriculture. The crops are bananas, citrus, mangoes, beans, corn, and cane. What shapes daily life as much as the soil is the distance. Salinas sits on the BR-251, 210 kilometres from Montes Claros and 108 kilometres from the BR-116, the great Rio–Salvador artery. Belo Horizonte is 631 kilometres away; Vitória da Conquista, over the Bahia line, is 250. Isolation and poor soils have kept the municipality poorer than the state average for a long time. It also, arguably, kept the cachaça honest — made in small pot stills, for neighbours, long before the rest of Brazil noticed.