Afternoon: Santo Antônio do Norte and Córregos
Leaving Serro, the route picks up the AMG-0810 heading southwest — the Estrada Real corridor rather than the faster MG-010 — and traces a slow arc through the hills toward Conceição do Mato Dentro. The road is rural and unhurried, the landscape shifting from the higher serra country around Serro into tighter, more wooded valleys.
Santo Antônio do Norte appears on this road as a brief passage through what was once recorded as Tapera. The French naturalist Auguste de Saint-Hilaire passed through in 1817 and described a single street with a church at one end, many houses already abandoned, the surrounding ground scored by the old workings of miners who had long since moved on. The colonial proportions have survived precisely because nothing has come to replace them.
The road continues southwest to Córregos, the oldest settlement in the municipality of Conceição do Mato Dentro, founded in 1702 when bandeirantes from the same expedition that established the Serro arraials found gold in the waters of the Ribeirão Santo Antônio. The Matriz de Nossa Senhora Aparecida — built between 1722 and 1738, with a single central bell tower and chanfrada facade typical of early Minas parish churches — anchors a small praça at the center of a colonial nucleo tombado by the IEPHA. The church's patronal image, a carved wooden figure of Nossa Senhora Aparecida (distinct from the terracotta figure that became the national patron), arrived under circumstances that have generated durable local legend: found in the village, apparently left by a passing traveler, origin unknown. From Córregos the road picks up the MG-010 for the final run south into Conceição.
Arrival: Tabuleiro
The MG-010 carries the route south through Conceição do Mato Dentro — established in 1702 when Gabriel Ponce de Leon erected a chapel to Nossa Senhora da Conceição after finding gold in the Córrego Cuiabá, reportedly 20 oitavas in a single pan — before a dirt road branches off for the final 19 km to the district of Tabuleiro. The village is small and unhurried, its silhouette defined by a chapel on a hill in the classic Minas fashion. The name is disputed: some attribute it to the flat-topped rock formations of the surrounding serra, others to the wooden trays (tabuleiros) on which women once balanced quitandas — cakes, pão de queijo, doces — to sell in Conceição. Until the 1980s the place was reachable only by mule track; the first jeep arrived within living memory. The village sits at the entrance to the Parque Estadual da Serra do Intendente, and the night is spent camping here. Tabuleiro has also, for decades, carried a reputation as a place where strange lights move through the hills at night — the Sociedade Mineira de Ufologia has long kept a presence here, and the stories persist among older residents. The Cachoeira do Tabuleiro — a 273 m (895 ft) free fall and the highest waterfall in Minas Gerais — waits for the morning.