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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