Milho Verde

From São Gonçalo the road continues south toward Milho Verde, arriving mid-morning. The settlement traces its name to a Portuguese prospector, Manuel Rodrigues Milho Verde, from the Province of Minho, who established mineral claims here in the early 18th century; a competing oral tradition credits an act of hospitality from a local resident who offered passing bandeirantes nothing but corn on the cob. Either way, Milho Verde hosted a Crown checkpoint controlling traffic into and out of the Distrito Diamantino, and its early prosperity collapsed under the same restrictive diamond laws that stunted São Gonçalo. What survived abandonment and a short-lived hippie wave in the 1970s is a village of grass-covered lanes, campos rupestres closing in on three sides, and an iconic chapel: Igreja de Nossa Senhora do Rosário, built in timber and earth sometime in the 19th century, perched on the highest point in the settlement and visible from the road in. The chapel's modest silhouette, reproduced on a Milton Nascimento album cover, has become inseparable from images of the village. Chica da Silva — the enslaved woman from the region of what is now called Baú who would later become one of colonial Brazil's most storied figures — is said to have been baptized in the older church here, the Igreja Matriz de Nossa Senhora dos Prazeres, which dates to around 1700.