Qualla: Chapada dos Guimarães National Park

Chapada dos Guimarães National Park: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Luciana Serra, CC BY-SA 4.0. For most of the 20th century the geographic centre of South America was marked by a white marble obelisk in downtown Cuiabá. The obelisk is still there. The centre is not — better measurement moved it northeast, up onto the escarpment, to a lookout inside Chapada dos Guimarães National Park now called the Mirante de Geodésia. Stand there and you are, as near as surveying can determine, at the middle of a continent. What is in front of you is not a monument but a drop: red sandstone cliffs falling several hundred meters to the lowland haze, with the whole Cuiabá basin laid out beyond.

Image: Luciana Serra | CC BY-SA 4.0

Chapada dos Guimarães National Park: A Colonel's Warning

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ananda Danif, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 ...

Image: Ananda Danif | CC BY-SA 4.0

Chapada dos Guimarães National Park: Seventy-Nine Years to a Signature

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Luciana Serra, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 organi...

Image: Luciana Serra | CC BY-SA 4.0

Chapada dos Guimarães National Park: The Bride's Veil

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Claudney Neves, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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...

Image: Claudney Neves | CC BY-SA 3.0

Chapada dos Guimarães National Park: Water for the Pantanal

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alessandro de L. Pinheiro, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 inla...

Image: Alessandro de L. Pinheiro | CC BY-SA 4.0

Chapada dos Guimarães National Park: Macaws in the Cliff Face

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 ...

Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0