🇧🇷 Brazil · Central-West
Chapada dos Guimarães is Mato Grosso's answer to the question of what to see beyond the Pantanal: a red sandstone plateau that rises abruptly above the plain, only 65 km from Cuiabá, with canyons of vertical ocher-stained walls, waterfalls that drop into the void —like the Véu de Noiva and its 86 meters of free fall— and a biodiverse cerrado home to the maned wolf, the giant anteater and hundreds of bird species. Much of that landscape is protected by the Parque Nacional da Chapada dos Guimarães, created in 1989 over some 32,600 hectares.
Beyond its natural beauty, the Chapada holds a special place in the Brazilian imagination: the legend of the geodesic center of South America turned it, from the 1980s on, into a magnet for spiritual communities, artists and seekers of energy. Today natural-food restaurants, crystal and craft workshops coexist in town with family pousadas and adventure travel agencies. The town center keeps its colonial charm around the Igreja de Nossa Senhora de Santana, built in 1779, and the Praça Dom Wunibaldo, the social heart of the town.
Visiting the Chapada means engaging with nature actively: hikes on red dirt trails, swims in natural pools, 4x4 transfers and viewpoints on the edge of the abyss. The attractions are split between the National Park (Véu de Noiva, waterfall circuit), the surroundings of the town (Mirante do Centro Geodésico, Portal da Chapada) and private fazendas such as the one holding the Caverna Aroe Jari, the largest sandstone cave in Brazil. The infrastructure is simple but functional, with local guides who know every corner of the plateau.
Inhabited by the Bororo and Paresí indigenous peoples before the Europeans arrived, the region was colonized in the 18th century during the gold rush that transformed Mato Grosso. The nucleus of the town was born in 1751 as the Jesuit mission of Sant'Ana da Chapada; after the expulsion of the Jesuits, the Igreja de Nossa Senhora de Santana was rebuilt and blessed in 1779, and in 1782 the settlement took the name Guimarães. It grew as the farming granary for the Cuiabá garimpos and the religious center of the plateau. The full story is on the history page.
Read the full history ↓The Centro-Oeste state where three great biomes meet —the Amazon, the Cerrado and the Pantanal—: land of bandeirantes and of the gold of Cuiabá, today a world agribusiness power and a paradise of the wildlife of the Northern Pantanal.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Seen from the baking plain of Cuiabá, the red rock walls of the Chapada dos Guimarães look like the ramparts of another world: a sandstone plateau rising hundreds of meters above the valley which, long before the viewpoints and the famous waterfalls, was a frontier, a refuge and sacred ground for indigenous peoples. When the first Europeans climbed the escarpment, the plateau had had owners for centuries: the Bororo and the Paresí.
The Bororo, who call themselves Boe, occupied broad areas of central-eastern Mato Grosso and developed one of the most sophisticated cultures of the South American interior, with complex funeral rituals lasting weeks, elaborate featherwork and basketry, and a cosmology that connected the world of the living with that of the spirits. For the Bororo, the plateaus, caves and valleys of the interior had a sacred dimension that went far beyond economic usefulness. The Paresí, for their part, lived in the western reaches of the plateau and were known for their farming and trading skills, with exchange networks that reached the Amazon and the Chaco.
When the bandeirante expeditions began pushing into the Brazilian interior in search of gold and of indigenous people to enslave —Pascoal Moreira Cabral's went up the Coxipó river in 1718-1719—, both Bororo and Paresí resisted the invasion. The clashes were bloody, and what weapons did not achieve, epidemics did: smallpox, measles and influenza brought by the colonists decimated the native populations with devastating speed. Religious missions tried to gather the survivors into aldeamentos, but those settlements were also centers of contagion and forced acculturation. By the end of the 18th century the indigenous presence in the Chapada had been drastically reduced, although the Bororo kept significant territories in other parts of Mato Grosso, where they live to this day.
The great colonizing push came with gold. In 1718-1719 Pascoal Moreira Cabral's expedition found the first nuggets on the banks of the Coxipó river, and the mining fever that followed transformed all of Mato Grosso: the town of Cuiabá was formally founded in 1727 and became the region's administrative center. The Chapada plateau, with its cooler climate and plentiful water, began to be settled almost at once: as early as 1720 the paulista Antônio de Almeida Lara climbed the escarpment to set up a farm, and the fields up top became the granary supplying food, sugarcane and cattle to the hot garimpos down in the valley.
The nucleus that gave rise to today's town was born in 1751, when the first governor of the captaincy, D. Antônio Rolim de Moura, arrived in Cuiabá accompanied by the Jesuit fathers Estevão de Castro and Agostinho Lourenço. Father Estevão founded the mission of Sant'Ana da Chapada on the plateau, a village that gathered the region's scattered indigenous people around a thatched chapel holding the images of Saint Anne, Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Saint Francis Xavier. The mission was short-lived: in 1759 the expulsion of the Jesuits from all Portuguese dominions, ordered by the Marquis of Pombal, left the village abandoned and its inhabitants dispersed.
Twenty years later came the second founding act. In 1778 the magistrate José Carlos Pereira, from Cuiabá, found the old mission chapel in a deplorable state and raised funds to build, half a league from the original site, a new church of rammed earth (taipa pilada). The Igreja de Nossa Senhora de Santana was solemnly blessed on July 31, 1779, and that afternoon a procession carried over from the Jesuit chapel the three sacred images, the only objects saved from the old mission. The church —today a gem of rustic Mato Grosso baroque and a protected monument— became the heart of the settlement, which in 1782 stopped being called Chapada de Santana and took the name Guimarães. The surrounding fazendas, given over to sugarcane, sugar and cattle, used enslaved African labor on a considerable scale: the parish records of Santana document baptisms and deaths of enslaved people throughout the colonial period.
As the gold deposits were gradually exhausted during the first decades of the 19th century, the economy of the Chapada dos Guimarães contracted. Cattle, sugarcane and subsistence farming took over from mining, and the town kept its importance as a religious center and supply hub for the plateau, though on a far more modest scale. The population, which had grown quickly during the mining boom, leveled off and in some periods fell.
The Paraguayan War (1864-1870) hit Mato Grosso head-on. In December 1864 Paraguayan troops invaded the south of the province, advancing along the Paraguay river and taking towns and forts. Although the invaders never reached the plateau, the conflict demanded a massive mobilization of men and resources: records document the forced conscription of young men from the region, including enslaved people freed on condition that they serve in the army. And the harshest blow came with the peace: in the years after the war, a smallpox epidemic —brought by the returning troops— killed close to a third of the Chapada's population, a demographic catastrophe the district took decades to recover from.
The end of the century brought another deep change: the abolition of slavery in 1888 dismantled the labor structure of the plateau's fazendas and sugar mills, which entered a long economic decline. Many formerly enslaved people and their descendants formed their own rural communities around the Chapada, and their cultural mark —in music, religious festivals and family names— is still alive in the municipality.
Through the first decades of the 20th century, the Chapada dos Guimarães was an isolated municipality of Brazil's Center-West, linked to Cuiabá by dirt roads that became impassable in the rainy season. That isolation paradoxically preserved both its colonial heritage and its nature. Milestones such as the Escola Evangélica do Buriti (1923), a pioneer in agricultural training, slowly modernized rural life; the mechanization of farming in the 1960s opened the cerrado to cultivation, and the expansion of cattle and crops in the 1970s pushed for the paving of the Cuiabá–Chapada highway (today's MT-251), which broke the isolation for good and brought the plateau within 65 km of the state capital.
The environmental milestone came on April 12, 1989, when Federal Decree 97.656, signed under the government of José Sarney, created the Parque Nacional da Chapada dos Guimarães: some 32,630 hectares of cerrado, gallery forest and wind-carved sandstone formations, protecting icons such as the Véu de Noiva waterfall (86 meters of free fall), the waterfall circuit, the Cidade de Pedra and the viewpoints along the rim of the plateau. Creating the park, managed today by ICMBio, meant negotiating with rural landowners and stirred tension with agricultural interests, but it laid the groundwork for the municipality's main economic engine today: nature tourism. At the end of 2022, management of visits to the park was granted as a concession to the private sector, with the promise of investment in trails, visitor centers and infrastructure.
In parallel, in the 1980s and 1990s the Chapada became a magnet for spiritual groups, artists and alternative communities drawn by the supposed energy of the place and by the legend of the continent's geodesic center. That phenomenon gave the town —which became a municipality separate from Cuiabá in the mid-20th century— an eclectic character out of scale with its size: adventure tourism, ecotourism, esoteric tourism and Mato Grosso rural life coexist here, and the plateau receives more than a hundred thousand visitors a year who come looking for waterfalls, endless viewpoints and that air of a world apart it has always had.