Lunch in Couto de Magalhães
Couto de Magalhães de Minas sits at 1,155 metres (3,790 ft) in the upper Jequitinhonha valley, about 39 kilometres northeast of Diamantina and a well-timed stop for a midday meal. The town was a traditional staging post along the old troop roads that funnelled goods — and diamonds — toward the highland capital; its streets are modest, its pace unhurried. The name honours the general and writer José Vieira Couto de Magalhães, who was born in Diamantina in 1837 and later led expeditions into the Araguaia and Tocantins river systems. Lunch here is straightforward mineiro cooking — rice, beans, salt pork, tutu, whatever comes out of the pot — at places like the Hotel e Restaurante Rio Manso on the central square or the Bar e Restaurante Matozinhos on the Praça Matozinhos. The Instituto Estrada Real identifies the town as one of Minas Gerais's better examples of popular reworkings of rococó architectural conventions, visible in its modest church façades on a short walk through the centre.
The final stretch from Couto de Magalhães into Diamantina covers 39 kilometres along the BR-367 through increasingly dramatic quartzite campo. The road gains altitude steadily and the views open across a landscape of extraordinary geological age — the Espinhaço supergroup, whose rocks are estimated at more than 1.7 billion years old. The city appears on a ridge of the Serra dos Cristais at around 1,280 metres (4,200 ft), its colonial roofline emerging from a setting that feels more like a high moorland than central Brazil.