History of the Forests in the Mining Region

Gilberto is an old-time diamond miner (garimpeiro), as was his father and grandfather, going back in time (almost certainly) to the slaves who were brought in to work the mines (Brazil only fully abolished slavery in 1888).

I've known Gilberto for years, and he can usually be found at a friend’s house at the foot of the hills. He spent most of his life living in a crude rock shelter in the mountains near his diamond claim, and feels much more at home away from the "big city" of Lençóis (population 10,000).

I had arranged for Gilberto to take me up into the mountains today to visit the "Bananeira" (banana tree), a small settlement of diamond miners in the old days, but now totally abandoned. To start the day (8:00 AM) he put down half a glass of "cachaça" (local rum) in one swallow, and off we went

The trail followed a popular tourist route for about a mile and then branched off to the south. I'm usually pretty good at following the old trails in the mountains, but this was exclusively over an exposed rock surface that had been little-used for years, so it all depended on Gilberto's sense of direction from his hundreds of trips in.

We came across an old shelter ("toca") at the "Bananeira" site that had been built under a wide sandstone ledge, and closed off with mud-and-wattle walls. These sites have been serially occupied over the decades (and centuries) by different generations of miners – and the last "owner" had been "remodeling" it by erecting stone walls (no mortar) to replace the mud walls when he died (of old-age) – so the job will remain incomplete. Nearby was a set of three tocas all in a row under an especially long rock overhang, each maybe 4 m wide and 3 m deep. One of them had been Gilberto’s father’s, and then his, but all three were totally abandoned now and in various states of disrepair. Tin cans, lots of cut wood (saplings) used to fashion crude beds, and a few old, rusting tools and assorted pieces of litter were strewn about. There was another very long and narrow toca near the creek. Floodwaters had washed away the outer wall, and but Gilberto told me that when he was younger there had been a good number of miners living there, while others slept under available rock overhangs wherever they could find them.

I took some documentary photographs and GPS readings then hiked down the Bananeira Creek to the Bananeira Falls (not too much water that day, but must be spectacular when it rains – with a sheer 20 m drop). We then turned upstream to find the toca where “Mãe-da-Lua" used to live (the nickname translates to "mother of the moon"). She was a diamond miner and apparently quite a character, sober at the diggings, but usually drunk and wild in town. This was about 40 years ago.

We were walking in the stony bed of the Bananeira Creek when Gilberto mentioned that there was a "homestead" on each side of the watercourse. Only someone who had lived there could have identified those sites, as they were both now completely overgrown and hidden by the heavy vegetation. I crashed my way through the entangled plants and the vestiges of loose mining debris to find small meadows completely overgrown by Brazilian stinkgrass (Melinis minutiflora, and African invasive species) – a sure sign of past human habitation. The grass was chest high and daunting to wade through, as it was impossible to see where you were stepping. I eventually arrived at (in both cases) the ruins of a very small, old stone house. Each seemed to be a simple one-room structure (about 3x4 m), with the end-walls peaking to about 2.5 meters to hold the roof beam. The sidewalls were made of stone and were only about 1 m tall – almost certainly having been completed to the roof with mud-and-wattle walls. The doorframe (opening) was on one of the walls that supported the roof (photo).

The old houses got Gilberto talking about the farming plots that the miners planted while working their claims. Miners were, of course, focused on mining – but they still had to eat. The mountains weren't really appropriate for farming or cattle raising, so the miners (and the towns that sprung up in the hills) were largely dependent on the corn, beans, and dried meat brought in by mule from settlements in the flatland "caatinga" and "cerrado" areas to the west (and to a certain degree, to the east) of the mountains. Cattle were driven in along traditional trails, which can still be seen in places between the towns of Palmeiras and Guiné.

As the population of the mining zone increased and became more established, agricultural valleys such as Capão and Pati (and smaller sites such as Capão do Correio and Baixa Funda) were occupied by families that divided their efforts between agriculture and mining, becoming exporters of coffee, bananas, oranges, beans, manioc and manioc flour, chickens and eggs, etc., to the mining communities around them on less amenable sites.

The miners in the mountains usually tended small gardens and kept chickens (there was even a stone chicken coop at the Bananeira site, a kind of miniature shelter right next to the other ones, only with a lower ceiling).

As we walked back to Lençóis, Gilberto told me that all of the wooded areas on the hilltops (which the miners couldn't reach with their stream diversions/primitive aqueducts and erosive mining – so they still had soil covers) had all been cleared and planted when he was young. Every available plot of land that still had soil on it, all along the trail back to town, had been farmed in the old days –mostly with manioc, "andu" beans, rustic pineapples, sugarcane, corn, and fruit trees (oranges, mango, jackfruit). This helps explain the fact that you almost never see old-growth forests anywhere except deep in the hills and far from the diamond region. Between cutting wood for construction/cooking and clearing for planting, all the forest sites (with very few exceptions) were cleared at one time or another. They are now covered with secondary growth vegetation– small trees (less than 15 cm [6 inches] in diameter), very closely spaced, with dense understories and low biodiversity.

The natural native vegetation is now slowly returning to the forest/farming plots that had been cleared and to the mountainsides that had been stripped of both plants and soils –like a Brazilian episode of the television series "Life after People" – as nature takes charge again.

I never did get to see the toca where “Mãe-da-Lua" used to live. We passed it, but Gilberto either forgot to show me the spot or, more likely, he was really in a hurry to get back to "civilization" and have another drink, and passed it by. Next trip. 

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Carbonados.

Image: Wikipedia

I sing the praises of carbonados. The jewelry-class diamonds found in the Chapada Diamantina made it rich and famous (at least in its time), but the most important legacy of the region has actually been almost forgotten – the carbonados!

The shiny beauty of diamonds brought thousands of miners and camp followers to the Chapada Diamantina starting about 1844 (just a few years before the famous California gold rush). Boomtowns popped up in every corner of the mountains where rich strikes were discovered. It was hard brutal work undertaken by both freemen and slaves, but the rewards were fantastic for many. There are no truly reliable records of the quantities of diamonds found there. An excellent review of the diamond trade in Bahia state was compiled by xxxxxx. This author uncovered official data from various archives, but the small sizes of diamonds, and the cultural skills of Brazilians who have honed the ability to avoid taxes and other government regulations over many generations, assured that only a small fraction of the riches produced ever came near the taxman and bean-counters. 

But while diamonds may be pretty (and not even very rare in the world) the most important legacy of the Chapada Diamantina – and by far the least known – was its production of black diamonds.

When the early miners were searching for diamonds they would often encounter nondescript black stones that would pan out together with the gemstones. The fact that they settled to the bottom of the "bateias" – the large (up to almost a meter/yard in diameter), shallow, conical wooden pans that the miners used in the final step of diamond purification – identified them as "curiosities", really nothing more.

Legend has it that these strange little black stones were traded by slaves to the diamond buyers in exchange for cheap cigars. They were later passed around among diamond merchants in Europe, geologists, and toolmakers. But surely no one could imagine at first how important a role they would have in changing the world.

Diamonds, being incredibly hard, had found many industrial uses, but their ultimate utility was limited by their single-crystal nature. Diamonds are hard, very hard, but not "tough". If you hit them on the right spot along their crystal fracture plane they will split in two, like a huge boxer with a "glass jaw" who will go down when his lesser opponent catches him with an unpretentious upper-cut. Down and out.

At some point, a toolmaker put a carbonado into a tool bit – and the results blew him out of the water. Here was a stone as hard as (or even harder than) a diamond that could be used to work metals and stone without fracturing, without breaking. Eureka!

Now this was great in itself. But there was a synergism about to happen that would move human engineering and creativity to a much higher plane. Things were about to really take off.

In 1867 a Swiss industrialist and inventor came up with something called dynamite. Incredible explosive energy that could be packaged and safely used. Mr. Nobel's dynamite (later “gelignite” – check it out on Google) could now reach its true potential.

With the ability to easily drill bore-holes in the hardest stone with the new carbonado-tipped rock drill bit developed by Leschot (1862), a Frence inventor, modern transport and commerce changed forever. 

With the carbonados found essentially exclusively in the Chapada Diamantina, the dynamite supplied by Nobel, and the rock drills invented by Leschot the, train tunnels could be driven through the Alps, the Panama Canal linked two mighty oceans, the subways (metros) in London and France moved the populations of entire cities, and heavy industrial mining bloomed. Everywhere in the world the mountains and rocks that stood in the way of human travel melted away. The world was now malleable.

This was the Golden Age of Engineering. The Eiffel Tower (1889), the Panama Canal (1914), improvements in iron fabrication, concrete production, the mastery of electric power generation. The transition to the modern industrial age. Your iPhones, Internet, space technology, and everything you see around you are the legacies of thousands of nameless slaves and miners who moved incalculable tons of sand, stones, and mud to uncover the ugly, black, little stones that changed the world.

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Mucugezinho.

I went with Dr. Mark Barringer, chairman of the History Department of the Stephen F. Austin State University (Texas), to visit some old miners’ shelters at a place called “Café-sem-troco” = “coffee, but no change”*. The name dates to the time when the federal highway was being constructed (in the late 1950s/early 60s) as part of the many infrastructure investments that accompanied moving the Brazilian capital from Rio de Janeiro to the interior of that country. Brasília was built in the middle of nowhere (as if Washington DC were to be rebuilt in Oklahoma) – requiring not only a new mega-city (and preplanned suburbs) but new roads radiating like spokes from a central hub.

Before I visited Brasília I imagined it was a sparkling metropolis built in a huge clearing in the Amazon jungle – but it was actually erected on the rolling plains of open savanna grasslands (locally “Cerrado”) in central Brazil that lacked only zebras, wildebeests, lions, and giraffes to be a carbon copy of the Serengeti plains. A bit disappointing – especially since there are absolutely no animals to be seen – much less uncounted millions of examples of the African Pleistocene megafauna.

If you ever get a chance to go to Brasília, don’t.  Buy some postcards instead. Dreadful place – a perfect example of the Jetsons-dream of the midcentury – a fully modern city built from scratch but planned only for cars – human interactions be damned.

But I digress…… The region around Café-sem-troco was intensively mined (by hand) for diamonds in the late 1800s. Extensive exposures of the conglomerate rocks associated with diamonds are found there, and every square inch of the land was scoured for precious stones. I read a report by a state official who visited the area at that time and noted many makeshift dwellings. Some of them have survived to today.

After the diamond boom wound down and the new road was built, rock cutters reoccupied the miners’ shelters for a time to produce cobblestones and paving stones.

The shelters (tocas) were built under rock overhangs that provided rustic roofs, and the living areas were defined by stone walls raised without mortar or plastering. Just a doorway, never a window; maybe an open cooking hearth, never a chimney (the smoke would escape through the porous walls); beds would be made from thin poles cut from saplings, but they quickly rot away.

I had visited this site many years ago (before there were digital cameras or accurate GPS coverage) but, being right near the highway, it was a convenient trip to show off the archaeological features and update my data.

After the creation of the National Park in 1985, rock cutting dwindled and the shelters were only used by occasional hunters or hermits/semi-crazies who would stay for a while before moving on.

I must note that that the site sits on a hairpin curve that presents a very convenient place for trucks to overturn. Two huge tandem trailers carrying soybeans have flipped over in the past 10 or so months – depositing tons of beans into a swampy area of impeded drainage right at the curve. The result is a huge cauldron of fermenting beans that will certainly continue to stink up the area for years to come. Remnants from the crashes, including scraps of canvas and pieces of plywood, have been incorporated into two of the tocas – adding another chapter to their serial occupation and modification.

As these tocas are right along the road and very near a popular tourist spot (the Mucujezinho River) we hope that the next stage will be controlled and informative visitation to these historic features of the diamond mining era.

*Apparently the old woman who set up the stand to sell morning coffee and snacks to the workers (and, presumably, after-hours hooch) never had (or hid) any small change in him - but would gladly discount those monies from the next round of refreshments.

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Acaba-Saco.

To the Corrego Acaba-Saco Creek  (March 1, 2006)

We went by car to the small village of Barro Branco, in the hills just a few kilometers north of the town of Lençóis. This had been a busy outpost during the diamond era but, like the rest of the region, slid slowly inexorably into decadence as the diamonds became fewer and farther between. By the time I arrived in Lençóis in the late 1970’s there were only about half a dozen occupied houses there. But the region is on an upswing now, with the growing tourism economy spreading into every corner of the lands outside the park. Barro Branco is no exception, and just about every square inch has now been bought up and parceled out.

We left the car as the edge of the National Park and walked upstream along the Acaba-Saco Creek*. These river walks are always enjoyable – rock-hopping over fallen, water-sculptured boulders, occasionally having to climb out of the river canyon to pass a small narrow cascade – always accompanied by lush riverside vegetation. Today, however, there was just a thin ribbon of green along the river banks, as recent fires had reduced the surrounding vegetation to charcoal. We were there making lemonade out of lemons, however, as our hike was to try to discover remnants of the mining activities of the 19th and early 20th centuries in the hills – especially miners’ shelters (tocas) – sites that are especially difficult to find when hidden under the normally lush mountain vegetation.

Our first find was a very humble shelter under a low rock overhang. Just a fire pit and a small, c rude rock "table". Probably just an escape from the wind/sun/rain during work breaks. After documenting the site (GPS coordinates, digital photographs, written description) we were just looking around (it was an elevated spot on a mountainside) when I saw what looked like a stone wall about a kilometer to the east on another mountainside. Off we went. Sometimes it's difficult to cross what otherwise appears to be a rather flat, open area. The hills have been extensively mined, and in many places the trenches opened up by the diamond miners to penetrate into natural fissures in the rock surface (and the piles of rocks extracted from those cracks) make it a formidable challenge to get from here to there. But we soon found ourselves at the foot of a low ridge with not one, but two, rock shelters. 

These shelters (tocas) are normally rather crude affairs – fashioned using a convenient rock overhang (maybe a meter or two deep and usually less than 2 m tall) that the miners wall off in the front with rough stones (no mortar) and call home. If the rock overhang is tall enough, deep enough, and wide enough, they will have a centrally placed "door". If the shelter is more modest (smaller), the entrance will just be a space left between the front stone wall and the hillside rock itself. Those two tocas were in good shape, although long abandoned – a very good find, indeed!

We had been heading for some interesting rock formations I had seen on Google Earth, so we started heading back to the ridge we had left (with that first small, crude shelter) and came across two more small tocas on the way.

The rock formations that we were initially heading for (and finally got to) were not all that exciting. The area had been extensively mined, but there were no signs of places the miners might have stayed. We finished the loop and then started heading back, working our way through some rather difficult terrain, with boulders, loose rocks, and dense vegetation (that had been spared by the fires). We eventually found a spring with cool water – and a rock overhang nearby to get out of the hot sun – a convenient place to relax that had obviously been used by miners before us for that very same purpose.

We were walking generally south now, and widening the loop by keeping to the base of a ridge to the west, hoping maybe to find another toca. Nothing. But then, up ahead to the east, on the other side of the canyon, we saw what looked like an extremely large shelter. Took us a good while to get there because the canyon had become fairly deep and full of boulders and trees, requiring a detour around it, but we finally got to the site and found three tocas, one next to the other. Only the central structure was in good shape and had, in fact, been fairly recently used (most likely by a hunter, an illegal but fairly common activity in the hills).

Continuing on, we hadn't expected to come across any more structures, but were soon surprised by a stand-alone stone house on an otherwise unimpressive hillside. These stone houses are rare prizes, and overwhelmingly outnumbered by tocas! There were also, right nearby, two true tocas and one undefined structure – a cubic 2 m x 2 m structure (with a door) less than 2 m tall. Hard to say what it might have been – a storage room, tiny house (with a flat roof?), chicken coop? Also a midden pile right next to the stone house, with broken crockery, for future archaeologists to enjoy.

The rest of the walk back did not present any new discoveries. We stopped off at the Mandassaia River before getting back to the car and took a well-deserved swim. All in all, a very good outing!

*Acaba-Saco translates to "ran-out-of-food" as the early miners would carry their supplies, on their heads, into the hills in cloth sacks. When the food gave out it was time to get back to town to resupply.

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The Forgotten Biomes of Brazil.

(photo: FCBS)

"Brazil has many biomes of which the most famous are the Amazon Forest and the Atlantic Rain Forest. Sadly, rapid deforestation is taking care of the former and only 7% is left of the latter! But there´s more, much more to be told when it comes to Brazil´s inexhaustible ability to destroy what it can not create.

This article covers the Cerrado, one of the Brazilian biomes "forgottten" by our legislators back in 1988, when the chapter of natural environment was being discussed for the new constitution to be soon released. The final voting defined the Amazon forest, the Atlantic Rain forest, the Serra do Mar, the Pantanal and the sea coast as national heritage areas. Ironically, the legal guarantee was of little effect, for the rate of destruction has only increased ever since!

But what about the Cerrado and the Caatinga, the two forgotten biomes not covered by the constitution? Well, what can I say? The readers know how politicians costumarily react to pressure from private interests (agribusiness and landowners). This time was not different. These areas were declared open to exploitation and "development", whatever this means. The inescapable consequence couldn´t be different: the rate of deforestation of the Cerrado now reaches a record of 30.000 km2 per year! A Project to amend the constitution by granting the Cerrado and Caatinga the necessary protection given to the other biomes is under discussion since...1995! (PAC 115/95).

To illustrate the catastrophic situation of the Cerrado, we have choosen to comment on the extraordinary Chapada Diamantina National Park (Diamond Highlands)in the state of Bahia, located in the northeast of Brazil, not far from mainland Europe, on the other side of the Atlantic. In Portuguese, the word chapada means a region of steep cliffs and Diamantina refers to the diamonds found there in the mid 1800s when Lençois was an important center of diamond mining.

Chapada Diamantina Chapada Diamantina Chapada Diamantina

"The region is semi-arid, however it has no shortage of water, from the many rivers and streams. The park is typified by hills, mountains, valleys and monoliths, with few plains."¹

The National Park of the Chapada Diamantina was created in 1985 but the federal government has not invested in the necessary infrastructure to guarantee the conservation of the area. In fact, a great portion of the land is privately owned but without personnel, transportation and material support it is impossible to enforce the necessary conservation measures.

Roy Funch The Chapada was the dream come true of an American-Brazilian biologist called Roy Funch. He convinced the Brazilian goverment to buy up large portions of land to ensure its survival and became the first Director of the Chapada Diamantina National Park. Funch has lived in Lençois - since 1978 - where he works as a guide, craftsman, biologist and writer. His books are a reference to the Chapada and we owe him very much for his idealism and realizations.

"In the mountains where the Chapada Diamantina National Park is located, altitudinal variations, topography, soils, strengh and orientation of the sun-light, and the rapidly changing humidity of the soil and the air, create opportunities for a rich and varied vegetation - a complex mosaic of ecosystems , which range from forests and swamps (at 400 meters/1300 feet) to high rock peak (1700 meters/5600 feet), each with their own unique and highly-adapted plant life". ²

The bulk of the vegetation types of the National Park is Cerrado (grassland with shrubs and small trees) or Savanna - a popular definition that the public will recognise and understand - but for the privileged readers of FCBS we prefer using a more precise definition:

-"Campos Rupestres (rocky fields from 700 to 2000 m) basically herbs and shrubs with sparce trees in a thin layer of poor soil (sand, pebbles or gravel). Tough weather. In order to survive under these severe conditions, plants had to adopt different strategies. This explains why they became highly specialized. Bromeliads, for instance, have water tanks to hold the rainwater which are the source of food and shelter for other forms of life. Campos Rupestres are an extraordinary ecosystem with very high endemism and diversity. Fire and drought are their worst enemies;

- Campos Gerais (open fields above 800 m) are "flat open grassland valleys found 800 m (2600 feet) or more above sea level. The soils are very sandy, extremely acidic, and have very low fertility....Even though the nutritive value of this natural pasture is very low, the local ranchers drive their cattle up to these high valleys in the dry season to take advantage of the water always available there. The problem is that they set fire to the whole área to force the grasses to sprout (the mature plants are too tough for the cattle), and the wildfires spread to every corner of the Park.

Together, the Campos Rupestres and Campos Gerais vegetation cover about 90% of the National Park area".²

The Brazilian Cerrado is the richest biodiversified Savanna in the world. It has more than 10,000 species of plants with an incredible 45% of endemism! It extends to almost 2 million square kilometers, approximately three times the size of the state of Texas in the United States.

"The area of Mucuge, in the State of Bahia, surveyed by personnel from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the Centro de Pesquisas do Cacau in Itabuna, shows some 670 plant species in about 900 square kilometres. The Serra do Cipo, a small sub-region of the Serra do Espinhaço at much the same latitude as New Caledonia, has been extensively investigated by teams from the University of São Paulo and the São Paulo Institute of Botany. Results to date show an extraordinary 1590 species in an area of only 200 square kilometres. Similar or higher counts, involving different species, are expected from elsewhere in the mountain range. (As a comparison, the whole of the British Isles, with an area of 151 000 square kilometres, has only about 1500 species of plants)". ³

Here is a brief list of the genera of bromeliads found in the Cerrado: Aechmea, Billbergia, Bromelia, Cottendorfia, Cryptanthus, Dyckia, Hohenbergia, Encholirium, Neoglaziovia, Neoregelia, Orthophytum, Tillandsia and Vriesea. All formidable plants, highly specialized and a balm to the eye and the spirit but increasingly consumed by criminal fires. Today, only about 20% of the original Cerrado is left and of that, only about 3% is protected. The disappearance of these sanctuaries is a tragic loss to mankind.

Notes:

¹ Wikipedia

² "A visitor´s guide to the Chapada Diamantina Mountains" by Roy Funch - See also: http://fcd.org.br/

³ "Towards Greater Knowledge of the Brazilian Semi-Arid Biodiversity", by Ana Maria Giulietti, Raymond Mervin Harley, Luciano Paganucci de Queiroz & Alessandro Rapini.  (Oscar Ribeiro of Bromeliário Imperialis | FCBS)

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What is good for the park, is good for its people.

(photo: Guia da Chapada Diamantina)

"Since our arrival in the Chapada Diamantina National Park, we feel that its history represents a strong symbol for our search. The contrast between the diamond extraction on one hand and the conservation of nature on the other, combined with the ongoing challenge to reduce poverty teach important lessons for those who envision a new balance between Earth and Man. The history of this park is mixed up with the life history of the man who first envisioned it, Roy Funch, an American biologist and naturalized Brazilian. We had the privilege to get to now him personally, and this post is an attempt to share what we learned in our conversation with him.

Roy Funch and us

Roy arrived in Brazil in 1977 as a Peace Corps volunteer from the United States. He knew very little about Brazil. He did not know that the language of the country was Portuguese and imagined that the Amazon covered the entire country. As a biologist passionate about nature, it was the image of a paradise. Hence, at his arrival, he was disappointed. In Brazil there where cars, big buildings and life was much more urban than he had thought.

After a short stay in Lavras in Minas Gerais, he was sent to Brasília to work on management plans for national parks at the Brazilian Institute for Forest Development (Instituto Brasileiro de Desenvolvimento Florestal (IBDF)), today the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade (ICMBio)). In theory, the work was interesting, but in practice he spent few days in the parks and a lot of days in an office in Brasília. It was not what he wanted.

He managed to get transferred to Recife but that post also was not what he wanted. Traveling with friends through the interior of Bahia for São João (big celebration in June) he got to Lençóis, Bahia for the first time. Lençóis is today the main tourist center of the Chapada Diamantina. His life would never be the same: “No exaggeration, I did not look for a place, but still in the bus, I thought, I found it!”

He went on some hikes with local miners, got to know the Fumaça waterfall from below and other places of the Sincorá ridge. His friends left after a week but he stayed. He rented a house in Lençóis where he lives until today. There, he had many roles and functions: Guide, Director of the National Park (which he calls a punishment since he had fought for its creation), Mining Inspector, head of the city’s tourism department and today of its environment department.

When Roy arrived in Lençóis the city was very different from today. Mining for diamonds and carbonate, the dominating activity in the region, paid little. The city was very poor, the historical heritage was not well taken care of, and the population was made up of mainly old and very young people, since all working age adults migrated to the Southeast (mainly São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro) in search for a better life. In the words of Roy, the city seemed to be the scenery for an old Western movie.

Yet the Sincorá ridge, its rivers and waterfalls were still there. Mining had, up to that point, been mainly manual and the degradation coming from diamond exploration, while existing, had not yet compromised its beauty. Roy became friends with the mining community and spent his time discovering the mountains. He hiked the ridge so often that he became an expert for its history and trails.

One time, in 1979, hiking in direction of Vale do Capão, the sky opened and he was overwhelmed by the incredible scenery. In that moment, he had the flash of an idea: “if this place were in Europe or the United States, it would certainly be a national park.” That was when he began to fight for the plan of a national park to protect the Sincorá ridge.

It was not an easy task. During those times, there was little environmental consciousness in the country, economic progress was the main driver for development and very few people could imagine that nature’s resources are limited. Even some friends did not believe in his campaign for the creation of a park!

In addition to Roy’s persistence, various other factors helped the process along. The main factor was the construction of a hotel by the state to promote tourism in the region. Several important people of the political scene of Bahia stayed there: ministers, members of parliament, senators and future governors. When these people arrived in Lençóis, they often asked for a guide to get to know the area. The local people would answer: “Guide, what guide? Talk to the American, he likes walking around the mountains.”

So Roy, besides being paid for what he did anyway, was able to sell his project to important figures of the Bahia state government. Some of them bought his idea and after a long journey, the park was created in 1985. But this did not happen without challenges. In 1982 almost everything was ready for the inauguration, the opening date was set and the official ceremony organized, when the government, under pressure from the miners and the “run for the diamonds”, decided to stop the process.

Diamond exploitation had seen a revival. Exploration entered into a new cycle in the early 1980ies using machines to extract the diamonds. That exploration was not regulated and was controlled by a few people. Still, in this extremely poor region, the little the local population gained was more than before. As Roy put it: “Every little thing was something, the old times were relived.”

Initially, Roy had not included their main exploration area as part of the park, but the federal government did, confronting the diamond miners. Mining for diamonds was illegal and as such did not generate taxes. Moreover, there was a strong media pressure for the closure of the exploration activities. TV Globo (the main national TV channel) produced several reports against this activity, and, around 1992, filmed the soap opera Pedra Sobre Pedra (Stone over stone) in Lençóis, which became a big national success. This contributed to an increase in eco-tourism in the region and strongly supported the conservation of the park.

The diamond miners fought as long as they could to continue their activities. During that time, Roy worked as mining inspector and as such had the role to reconcile the conservation of the park with the diamond exploration. He tried to convince the miners to use cleaner, yet more expensive techniques, to protect the water of the rivers. Despite his attempts, they reached no agreement, since the diamond explorers were not interested in increasing their costs to protect nature. In 1996, 6 months after leaving his job as inspector and mediator, the army closed the all non-manual mining activities.

Today, there is no machine mining left and the park receives thousands of visitors from all over the world. Lençóis and the other cities in the region grew and have more resources for conservation, not just of the environment, but also of their historical heritage.

The Chapada Diamantina National Park, like the majority of Brazil’s national parks is still not fully implemented. There are neither fences nor gates, nor enough resources for their maintenance. Yet, there can be no doubt that the park exists. It exists in the hearts of many people, in particular in those of the local population. The guide associations clean its trailswithout extra remuneration, many local citizens are volunteers in the fire brigades, and the new generations see in the park their heritage that has to be preserved.

There are still many challenges to be confronted. Roy reminded us that besides companies without a sense of environmental responsibility, poverty is another big enemy of nature. To overcome poverty, people invade protected areas to live, plant, hunt or search for precious stones. They often are not environmentally conscious since their main concern is to survive. In Lençóis, ecotourism lead to economic growth in the city, but poverty still persists, since the newly generated opportunities attracted thousands of people from the surrounding areas in search for a better life.

This is why today through ecotourism and in the past by promoting clean mining Roy fought and continues to fight for the importance of reconciling conservation with economic activities to the benefit of both nature and people. For his history and his role in the creation of Chapada Diamantina National Park, Roy is for us a great example." (Suficiente)

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Roy Funch - Lençóis in the 70's.

(Fonte: Guia da Chapada Diamantina)

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