The first Portuguese party to reach this country came the long way round. In the 18th century, Captain Francisco de Souza Meira crossed out of the captaincy of Minas Gerais with a column of bandeirantes, descended the Rio Brumado along its right bank, and reached the confluence with the Rio do Antônio near the site of the modern town. There they met the Tupinambá people who had lived on this land long before any Portuguese knew its name, and a sharp fight broke out close to what is now Brumado's municipal center. The Tupinambá resisted but were gradually pushed from the area, their lives and their language giving way to the expanding frontier. Souza Meira claimed the land as his own and named it Conquista. He founded a farm he called Das Éguas Serra - the Farm of the Range of Mares - on the flank of the mountain that still carries the name today. The town that grew from that farm was called Bom Jesus dos Meiras for more than a century.

Brumado was emancipated from the larger municipality of Caetité on 11 June 1877, during the height of coronelismo - the age of local strongmen who ran Brazil's interior like private estates. The provincial deputy Marcolino Moura drafted the emancipation. The first intendant was Colonel Exupério Pinheiro Canguçu, the fourth and last lord of the Sobrado do Brejo, a colonial manor whose ruins still stand on land now owned by the mining company that transformed the region. That transformation came in 1939, when the mining firm Magnesita S.A. - founded by the French-Brazilian partners Miguel Pierre Cahen and Georges Louis Minviele with local politician Antônio Mourão Guimarães - arrived to exploit the enormous magnesite and talc reserves locked inside the Serra das Éguas. The Federal Railway Network reached Brumado the same year, hauling ore to the port of Aratu in Salvador. The town that had been Bom Jesus dos Meiras became a mining town overnight. Today the company is known as RHI Magnesita, and the Serra das Éguas remains one of the largest magnesite deposits on Earth.

Geography here is a collision. Brumado sits at 454 meters above sea level, but the Pico das Éguas rises to 1,100 meters a short distance out of town, high enough to support campos rupestres - the rocky montane grasslands that bloom with shrubs and wildflowers above 900 meters. Below those summits the vegetation shifts down through ciliar gallery forest along the rivers to cerrado savanna on the plateau, and then into caatinga scrub, the dry thorn forest that is Brazil's most drought-adapted biome. Rainfall averages only 700 to 800 millimeters a year, and temperatures hover around 22°C. The rivers are mostly temporary. The Rio Brumado, a tributary of the Rio de Contas, rises in the Serra das Almas - the Range of Souls - and flows past the town before joining the larger system. The municipality borders the famous Chapada Diamantina along the Rio de Contas, though the diamond-bearing tablelands give way here to the gentler, drier Serra Geral. The bedrock is metavolcanic, ancient, and so mineral-rich that geologists study it as one of the oldest soil profiles in Brazil - holding iron, manganese, emeralds, quartz, and the magnesite that built the town.

Brumado's patron saint is Bom Jesus, and the old name still colors the calendar. The municipal holiday falls on 11 June, the date of emancipation in 1877, which happens to coincide with Evangelical Day - a useful overlap in a city where Catholics and evangelicals now worship in roughly parallel numbers. St. Sebastian's procession has been walking the streets every 20 January since 1960, and the June festas of St. John and St. Peter light up the interior with bonfires and forró music. Carnival in Brumado was once a proud tradition, launched in 1949 by a group of friends who wanted their own revelry and moved to the clubs by 1951. The great drought year of 1998 effectively ended it; since then news of its cancellation has outrun news of its celebration. What has grown instead is the cavalcade - mounted riders in their hundreds tracking from the north of the municipality to the south, a moving social occasion with sertanejo music at every stop. Above town the Pico das Éguas keeps its caves and springs, little-visited and still waiting for the tourism the town has never quite built.