Casa de Juscelino Kubitschek

From the Mercado, a short walk through the stone-paved lanes reaches the Casa de Juscelino Kubitschek, the modest pau-a-pique house on the Rua São Francisco where Brazil's great postwar president grew up between 1902 and the early 1920s. The house is built in traditional wattle-and-daub — a technique unchanged from the colonial period — and that a future president of Brazil spent his boyhood in such a structure says something about how little this corner of Minas had changed in the two centuries since the diamond rush. The small museum inside holds personal photographs, documents, and the guitars JK played at the serestas — the informal evening concerts central to Diamantina's social life, which he continued to attend long after leaving the city. The entrance fee is nominal.