Before it was a trailhead, this was a mining camp called Baixa dos Veadeiros. The rock underfoot is laced with quartz, and for a stretch of the mid-twentieth century that quartz was worth crossing a continent for. Radio equipment ran on crystal oscillators, and a great deal of the world's supply came out of hand-dug pits in places exactly like this one. Garimpeiros arrived by the hundred, working the seams with picks and sieves. At the height of the rush the settlement held something like two thousand people. Then laboratories learned to grow synthetic crystal — cleaner, cheaper, better suited to the machines — and the buyers simply stopped coming. The camp emptied out. The village took its present name from an image of Saint George brought here by a resident known as Zequita. About a thousand people live in São Jorge today, and the old workings on the hillsides are quietly going back to scrub.

Chapada dos Veadeiros National Park was created on 11 January 1961 by President Juscelino Kubitschek, who at that moment was 230 kilometres to the southwest putting the finishing touches on Brasília. The park protects a slab of high cerrado that climbs from around 600 metres to roughly 1,650, and the stone it stands on is genuinely ancient — quartzite on the order of 1.8 billion years old, some of the oldest exposed rock in Brazil. In 2001 UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site alongside Emas National Park, recognising the two together as the Cerrado Protected Areas. From the village the boundary is a short walk. Trails run out from there into a landscape of tabletop ridges, burnt-orange soil, and waterfalls that drop off the plateau in single unbroken threads.

The most photographed thing near São Jorge is not in the park at all. Twenty minutes on foot from the village, the Rio São Miguel has spent an unimaginable span of time grinding its bed into the quartzite, and the result is the Vale da Lua — Moon Valley. The rock has been scoured into smooth grey bowls, chutes, funnels and craters, pale and pitted enough that the name explains itself the moment you arrive. Water still runs through the hollows. Two of them are large enough to swim in. Standing barefoot on stone worn glassy by a billion years of river is a strange sensation: the surface feels almost synthetic, like poured concrete, until you notice the seams of crystal catching light in the walls.

Walk the village streets and you keep meeting the same hand. Moacir Faria, a self-taught artist who lives in São Jorge, has covered walls around town with murals crowded by sacred and profane figures — saints and devils and stranger things sharing the same plaster. The work is usually filed under art brut, the category reserved for artists working outside any school or market, and it fits: nothing here is polished for a gallery. In a village where most of the visual interest is geological, Faria's walls are the human counterweight, and they give São Jorge a face that no amount of pousada signage could.

There is no bus. From Alto Paraíso de Goiás you either pay a taxi somewhere around sixty reais or you put out a thumb, which people do constantly and successfully. Once you arrive, the village runs on a small, dense economy of pousadas — several offer yoga classes, massage, one of them a sauna — and on a handful of kitchens: Casa das Flores with its wine list and craft beer, Nenzinha for a well-seasoned plate of home cooking, Papalua for pizza, crepes and the Goiano empanada. Mobile coverage is good, and most guesthouses have WiFi, which sits oddly with the dirt roads. Hot springs lie within reach if you have a vehicle or a guide. Everything else is walking distance, which is the point.