The instinct to protect this place is more than a century old. On 13 September 1910, Colonel Pedro Celestino Corrêa da Costa, then vice president of Mato Grosso, declared the area one of public utility. His concern was specific and, in hindsight, prescient: the vegetation at the headwaters of the Coxipó-açu, the Manso and the Cuiabá rivers was being cleared, and those rivers were what made the country below habitable. Chapada, in Brazilian usage, means a region of steep cliffs at the edge of a plateau — the word describes the geography precisely. What Corrêa da Costa understood was that a plateau edge is also a water tower, and that what happens on top determines what flows off it.

The park itself took most of a century to arrive. In 1984 a coalition of environmentalists, artists and intellectuals in Mato Grosso launched a petition against a state plan to build a tourist complex near the escarpment. Two years later, in February 1986, non-governmental organizations took the campaign national, asking President José Sarney to create a park outright. Three years after that they got it. Chapada dos Guimarães National Park was established on 12 April 1989 under Law 97.656, covering 32,630 hectares across the municipalities of Cuiabá and Chapada dos Guimarães, with a mandate to protect the local ecosystems and archaeological sites while allowing visitors, education and research. Seventy-nine years had passed since the colonel's decree.

The Coxipó River reaches the edge of the plateau and simply leaves it. Véu de Noiva — Bridal Veil — falls 86 meters into a horseshoe amphitheatre of red sandstone, and the name is earned: the water spreads and thins on the way down until it drifts rather than falls, a translucent sheet against dark rock. The viewpoint is an easy 550-meter walk from the park entrance, which means the park's single most photographed feature is also its most accessible. The cliffs that frame it run 600 meters and more in height in places, banded in rust and ochre, and they set the character of the whole park: mountain peaks, more waterfalls, and caves worked into the sandstone.

Everything here drains toward one of the largest wetlands on Earth. The park sits in the basin of the upper Paraguay River and protects the headwaters of the Cuiabá, a principal feeder of the Mato Grosso Pantanal. When the Pantanal floods each year and turns into the shallow inland sea that supports its jaguars and caiman and hyacinth macaws, a portion of that water started as rain falling on these clifftops. The park is a component of the Pantanal Biosphere Reserve, which also takes in the Pantanal, Emas and Serra da Bodoquena national parks along with the Serra de Santa Bárbara, Nascentes do Rio Taquari and Pantanal do Rio Negro state parks. Corrêa da Costa's water-tower logic, formalized.

Red-and-green macaws nest in the sandstone walls, along with parrots and swifts that work the updrafts along the escarpment edge. On the ground the park holds jaguar and puma, tapir, giant anteater, armadillo, maned wolf, howler monkeys, pampas deer, greater rhea and seriema — a roll call that spans cerrado and forest species because the park straddles the transition between them. The main threat is fire. During the cool, dry, windy stretch of the year, blazes started by human activity near or inside the park can move fast through dry cerrado. Lightning, oddly, is not much of a risk here: in this climate it usually arrives with rain behind it.