The Casca d'Anta is the first waterfall on the São Francisco River. One hundred and eighty-six metres of white water comes off the escarpment edge and lands in a pool at the foot of the cliff, and by any measure it is a spectacle. What makes it strange is the timing. The São Francisco is the great river of the Brazilian interior, a working artery that will eventually cross most of the country's northeast — and here, barely out of the ground, it is already throwing itself off a cliff. Serra da Canastra National Park exists in large part to protect the few kilometres of tableland upstream where that river begins.
The park sits on the watershed between two of South America's major river systems, which is a more consequential piece of ground than the gentle grassland suggests. Water falling on one side of the Canastra tableland goes east with the São Francisco toward the Atlantic. Water falling on the other goes into the Rio Grande to the south, or the Araguari to the north, which feeds the Paranaíba; the Rio Grande and the Paranaíba meet downstream to form the Paraná, and that runs south for two thousand kilometres to Argentina. Altitudes climb toward 1,500 metres at the highest peaks. A single road crosses the highest part of the park east to west for more than sixty kilometres, and the lookouts along it are reachable by car on dirt in good weather — which is not all weather.
Two of the park's landmarks carry names given by people who had cattle on their minds rather than tourists. The Garagem de Pedras — the stone garage — and the Curral de Pedras, the stone corral, are rock formations on the tableland named for the shapes they suggested to whoever was up there first. That is the register of this landscape generally. It is not a wilderness in the untouched sense; it is high country that people grazed, crossed and used for generations before it was fenced into a park, and the vocabulary still shows it. The rocky fields and cerrado that cover most of the plateau are broken only by clumps of riparian forest hiding in the valleys and ravines, where water and shelter let taller trees hold on.
Two animals define Canastra for anyone who comes looking. The maned wolf is not a wolf at all but a long-legged, red-coated canid built for seeing over tall grass, and the park's open cerrado is prime habitat. The other is a duck, and its situation is far more precarious. The Brazilian merganser is critically endangered, with something on the order of 250 birds left in the wild across three states, and the largest known population — between roughly 140 and 200 mature individuals — lives in and around Serra da Canastra. It needs fast, clear, unsilted rivers, which is precisely what agriculture, mining and dams take away. The rest of the roster is remarkable in its own right: giant anteaters, giant armadillos, bush dogs, pampas deer, cougars, oncillas, ocelots, greater rheas striding through the grass, toco toucans, king vultures, crested caracaras and red-legged seriemas.
Botanically the Canastra tableland is an island. Forty-five species of flora here are endemic — found in this range and nowhere else on the planet — including *Barbacenia fulva*, *Microlicia canastrensis*, *Chaetostoma canastrensis* and *Miconia angelana*, alongside undescribed species of *Svitramia* and *Tibouchina* still working their way through the literature. Endemism on this scale happens where high ground isolates populations for long enough that they diverge, and the rocky fields of the Canastra have been doing exactly that. Three amphibians are endemic too. Rainfall averages 1,250 millimetres a year and the mean temperature is a mild 18°C, though the plateau can drop close to freezing on winter nights.
Nothing carries the name of this range further than its cheese. Queijo canastra is made from raw cow's milk in the municipalities that ring the park — São Roque de Minas, Vargem Bonita, Delfinópolis, Medeiros, Bambuí, Piumhi and Tapiraí — and its dense, spicy character is credited to the altitude, water and pasture of these highlands. Around 1,800 families produce roughly 4,500 tonnes a year. Brazil declared the cheese part of its intangible cultural heritage in 2008, and in 2024 UNESCO inscribed the artisanal Minas cheesemaking tradition on its own list. The park itself has had a harder administrative road. Created by decree on 3 April 1972 with 197,810 hectares and now managed by ICMBio, it spans six municipalities — and as of 2016 only about 70,000 hectares had actually been regularized, with former owners compensated. Half a century on, much of Serra da Canastra remains a park on paper first and on the deed second.
Serra da Canastra National Park is centred near 20.25°S, 46.50°W in southwestern Minas Gerais, north of the Rio Grande. Terrain is the defining hazard and the defining feature: a broad tableland with altitudes from about 750 m up to peaks approaching 1,500 m, bounded by escarpments. The single unmistakable visual landmark is the Casca d'Anta, the 186 m first waterfall of the São Francisco River, on the western escarpment — its plume is visible from a considerable distance after rain. The 60 km east–west road across the high plateau is the other reliable reference line. Nearest fields with ICAO identifiers are Passos (SNOS) to the southwest and Araxá's Romeu Zema Airport (SBAX) to the north; Uberaba (SBUR) is further northwest. Stay at or above 2,000 ft AGL over the park to avoid disturbing wildlife, and higher for terrain margin on the plateau. Winter mornings bring valley fog and occasional near-freezing temperatures; the wet season, roughly October to March, brings strong afternoon convection over the escarpment and delivers most of the 1,250 mm annual rainfall.