Explore Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo
In the hills and mountains inland from Vitória are several small towns surrounded by superb walking country, great for a day-trip or as a base for a relaxing few days. You can easily spot where the first immigrants came from: the houses and churches of Santa Teresa look as Italian as those of Domingos Martins, Santa Leopoldina or Santa Maria look German. The smallest of these towns, Venda Nova, is home to the remarkable sight of Pedra Azul, a grey granite outcrop almost 1000m high that’s one of the unsung natural wonders of Brazil. If you’re heading for Minas Gerais, Venda Nova lies on the main Vitória–Belo Horizonte highway, Domingos Martins just off it. The area is a popular destination for residents of Vitória, so if you plan to stay over a weekend – in particular in the winter dry season, when the trails can be approached most comfortably, the sky is blue and there’s a chill in the air – pre-booking accommodation is advisable.
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Domingos Martins
Domingos Martins
The closest of the inland towns to Vitória is DOMINGOS MARTINS, 42km away on the north side of the Belo Horizonte highway. Almost completely surrounded by steep hills, Domingos Martins is high enough to be bracingly fresh by day and distinctly cold at night; it looks like a run-down German mountain village, with its triangular wooden houses modelled after alpine chalets.
- Venda Nova and Pedra Azul
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Santa Teresa
Santa Teresa
SANTA TERESA is only 90km northwest from Vitória but the hills between them are steep, reducing buses to a crawl for significant stretches and padding the journey out to a good two hours. The initial run up the main highway towards Bahia to the hill town of Fundão is attractive enough, but the winding road that takes you the 13km from here to Santa Teresa is something special, with great views on either side of the bus. The soils are rich, and dense forest is interspersed with coffee bushes and intensively cultivated hill farms, framed by dramatic granite cliffs and escarpments.
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Santa Leopoldina
Santa Leopoldina
The drive to SANTA LEOPOLDINA (commonly known as just Leopoldina) from Santa Teresa is fabulous, along a country road winding through thickly forested hills and gorges. Despite the temporary look of the road and the tiny settlements you pass through – clearings in the forest uncannily like Amazon highway settlements – these are long-established communities dating from 1919, when the road was finished.
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Santa Maria
Santa Maria
The road leading to SANTA MARIA DE JETIBÁ passes through hilly terrain, densely cultivated with coffee bushes, interspersed with pine plantations and, on the steepest of hillsides, patches of Mata Atlântica. As you enter Santa Maria – essentially one long street, the Avenida Frederico Grulke – you are greeted by a “Willkommen” sign. This is an outward expression of Santa Maria’s intense pride in its German heritage, an ancestry the village is keen to promote as a tourist attraction. Virtually the entire population is descended from mid-nineteenth-century immigrants from Pomerania and today remains bound together by a common heritage based on the continued use of the Pommersch Platt dialect and membership in the Lutheran Church.
