The Haunted City Of Ouro Preto

Gold mine in Ouro Preto

Like the rest of Brazil, Ouro Preto is haunted. An absurdly picturesque Baroque theme park and World Heritage site, it is also a monument to unfathomable horror. Bones rattle in the stuffy tourist air and if you listen closely a spectral army shuffles along the cobbled streets. It is an uncomfortable and disturbing place. In the damp red rock depths of a stooped tunnel, a dim lantern illuminates the hammered scars of African miners searching for gold. Most of it is destined for Europe, but some finds its way down the hill to the Basilica de Nossa Senhora de Pilar. A gold leaf architectural masterpiece and pride of the city, it is famed throughout Brasil. I struggle for breath in such oppressive places.

To Europeans of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, indigenous peoples and Africans were godless uncivilised savages without souls. Dehumanised in this way, there were no moral boundaries as to how such bodies could be employed. Fourteen-hour days hanging for dear life on rickety scaffold or drowned a kilometre underground. Outside in the blazing sun an old man with crinkled black skin tells me that the bodies of slave construction workers lie buried in the thick walls.