Tropical Scotland

Serra de Cipo, Minas Gerais

The Serra de Cipo is a colossal ridge of pre-Cambrian rock scattered with waterfalls, archaeological remains and rare species of flora and fauna. As I entered what is now a National Park, I had a strange déjà vue. The intense dry heat, sandy red earth, swathes of white sand and cactus equated to desert scrubland, but the cliff edges and rocky outcrops screamed Scotland. I time travelled. Memories flooded back of the days and weeks spent walking through the Scottish Highlands, always a majestic experience, but one that is haunted. For the picturesque wilderness that tourists flock to, is not a natural occurrence but the result of violence. First the intensive deforestation of native woodlands for agriculture and to provide fuel and construction materials, and second, the clearances, the forced expulsion from the land of subsistence farming communities. The rugged ‘glens’ and ‘mountains’ of Cipo possess the same eerie emptiness and similarly bear the traces of former lives. Between eight and twelve thousand years ago this area of Brasil was inhabited by hunter gatherer communities that left behind extraordinary ochre images that decorate caves in nearby Lagoa Santa. In one of these the skull of ‘Luzia’ was found. The rebuilt head sparked controversy,  for staring at anthropologists was what looked like the face of a woman with pronounced African features. One theory suggests that prior to the migratory wave of Asiatic descent that crossed the Bering Strait and gave birth to the indigenous communities throughout the Americas, evidenced in the remains of axes and ceramics found in the Serra, there was another far older movement of people of African and Australian Aboriginal origin. More recent DNA testing casts doubt on this thesis and suggests that both peoples possess the same genetic code, but what we know for certain is that thousands of years later, in the seventeenth century, Sertanista Paulistanas of European descent crossed the Serra in the hunt for precious metals and stones, and brought this prehistory of Brasil to an abrupt end.