Cacoal → Campo Novo do Parecis

Cacoal → Campo Novo do Parecis

Date: Sunday, May 9, 2027 · Distance: ~359 mi · Driving time: ~8h 30m (excluding stops) · Open in Google Maps

Road surfaces
Asphalt · 350 mi · 97%
Paved · 6 mi · 2%
Unknown · 4 mi · 1%

The BR-364 has been the organizing artery of this entire journey south through Rondônia, but today it becomes something else — the road through which Brazilian settlement history plays out in almost textbook form. From rubber tappers and telegraph wire to colonist soybean farmers and Parecis tollbooths, the 560 kilometres between Cacoal and Campo Novo do Parecis compress a century of westward expansion into a single afternoon's drive.

The Drive

The day begins with an 8:00 departure from Cacoal, heading south along the BR-364. The highway here rolls through the agricultural patchwork of southern Rondônia — ranches, secondary forest, and occasional towns strung along the road at regular intervals, each one bearing the marks of the INCRA colonization projects that reshaped the region in the 1970s and 1980s.

Pimenta Bueno sits at the confluence of the rivers Apediá and Barão de Melgaço, and like Cacoal it owes its origins to two distinct waves: the telegraph line that Marechal Rondon's commission strung through here in the early 1910s — giving the town its name, in honour of a 19th-century Cuiabá-born military engineer whose geographical notes Rondon had used as reference — and the BR-364 itself, which transformed what had been a tiny settlement sustained by a telegraph post and the rubber trade into a municipality of forty thousand. The town received its current status only in 1977, the same year as most of its neighbours along the highway; before that, the whole corridor south of Ji-Paraná was technically administered from Porto Velho, 700 kilometres away. Fuel up at the Posto São Roque on the way out of town before continuing south.

Resuming south, the road climbs in stages toward the Planalto dos Parecis. Near the state border with Mato Grosso the landscape shifts noticeably: the dense Amazonian vegetation of Rondônia gives way to something flatter and more open, the transition from rainforest to cerrado that marks the edge of the plateau.

Lunch: Vilhena

Vilhena arrives around midday — a natural place to stop. It is the easternmost city in Rondônia, sitting at 615 metres on the edge of the Parecis plateau, which gives it a noticeably cooler and drier feel than the lowland cities to the north. Like Pimenta Bueno, Vilhena grew from a Rondon telegraph post established around 1910; for decades it was little more than an abandoned station, its two remaining families noted by Claude Lévi-Strauss when he passed through in 1938 and described in Tristes Trópiques. The BR-364 changed everything: when Juscelino Kubitschek himself flew in by FAB aircraft in July 1960 to inaugurate the road, Vilhena was still just a clearing in the forest. Today it is the most prosperous city in Rondônia by human development index, driven by soy and cattle operations across the surrounding plateau. The city's grid follows the old military avenue names — Marechal Rondon, Major Amarante, Capitão Castro — a reminder of how recently the army built the place from scratch.

After lunch, cross into Mato Grosso. The Posto Planalto, at BR-364 km 154 in Campo de Júlio, is a fuel stop on the MT side of the border.

Shortly before Campo Novo do Parecis, the route passes through the Terra Indígena Utiariti, where a passage fee is collected at a manned checkpoint on behalf of the Parecis people. The toll dates from the paving of the MT-235, the road linking Campo Novo do Parecis to Sapezal, which cuts through the reserve's 63 kilometres. The Parecis — whose territory Rondon traversed between 1907 and 1915, and whose lands hosted a Jesuit mission and boarding school from the 1940s through the 1970s — have maintained the right to collect the fee under a formal agreement with FUNAI. It is a small sum and the process is straightforward; have cash ready.

Arrival: Campo Novo do Parecis

Campo Novo do Parecis is a planned agricultural city set on the Chapada dos Parecis, the vast plateau that stretches across northwestern Mato Grosso. Its history is recent and straightforward: Rondon passed through in 1907 on his way to Salto Utiariti, and in January 1914 Theodore Roosevelt rode through the same corridor alongside Rondon during his Amazonian expedition, but neither man stopped to found a town. Organised settlement came only in the 1970s, when migrant families from the southern states arrived to work the plateau's famously productive red clay soils. The municipality wasn't formally established until 1988 — carved out from distant Diamantino — and today it is one of Brazil's leading producers of sunflower, popcorn corn, and soy.

The city itself is geometrically laid out on the plateau, where the horizon seems to extend in every direction without interruption. It functions primarily as a service hub for the surrounding agricultural operations, but it also serves as the gateway to the Chapada's natural attractions — among them the Salto Utiariti, a 98-metre waterfall on the Rio Papagaio, roughly 95 kilometres to the north, inside the Parecis indigenous territory. The name Utiariti means "place of wise people" in the Parecis language, and the site carries the traces of the Jesuit mission and Rondon's telegraph work alongside its natural drama.

Settle in for the evening. The drive from Cacoal has been long and the plateau air, at altitude, carries a freshness that is a relief after the lowland heat.