Qualla: Furnas do Bom Jesus State Park

Furnas do Bom Jesus State Park: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hgduenas, CC BY-SA 3.0. From the tabletop above Pedregulho the land gives nothing away. Flat-crowned hills, dry grass gone the colour of straw by August, a sky that runs unbroken to the horizon — it reads as farmland, because for most of the last century that is exactly what it was. Then the ground opens. The Bom Jesus canyon drops away underfoot, its walls falling as much as two hundred metres, and the temperature changes as you descend into air the sun has not reached. Seven waterfalls come off these cliffs. The tallest of them free-falls 132 metres before it finds anything to land on.

Image: Hgduenas | CC BY-SA 3.0

Furnas do Bom Jesus State Park: Caves of the Good Jesus

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alandieri Bernal, CC BY-SA 4.0. *Furnas do Bom Jesus* translates as caves of the Good Jesus, a name borrowed from the canyon that threads through the middle of the protected area. The park covers 2,069 hectares in the municipality of Pedregulho, in the far northeast of São Paulo state within the Ribeirão Preto ...

Image: Alandieri Bernal | CC BY-SA 4.0

Furnas do Bom Jesus State Park: Where Two Brazils Overlap

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. Ecologically, this is a seam. Cerrado — the vast, fire-adapted savanna of Brazil's interior — pushes up against fragments of Atlantic Forest, and the park protects both. The distribution follows water with almost diagrammatic clarity. On the interfluves, between drainages, you ge...

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

Furnas do Bom Jesus State Park: The Coffee Scar, Healing

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeferson Ricardo, CC BY-SA 4.0. Almost all of the natural cerrado on the flat chapada tops and the gentler slopes was cleared — first for coffee, then for pasture. That happened across the whole biome; the cerrado has been drastically modified by human hands, and this corner of São Paulo was no exception. What ...

Image: Jeferson Ricardo | CC BY-SA 4.0

Furnas do Bom Jesus State Park: A Decree and What Followed

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Margarida61, CC BY-SA 3.0. The park exists because of state decree 30.591, signed on 12 October 1989. A second decree, 31.644 of 31 May 1990, declared the land to be of social interest for the purposes of expropriation — the legal machinery required to convert private coffee country into a public reserve. ...

Image: Margarida61 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Furnas do Bom Jesus State Park: What Moves Under the Trees

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Margarida61, CC BY-SA 3.0. The climate is Köppen Cwb — tropical altitude — hot and humid through the summer, cold and dry through the winter, with winter nights that can fall to a few degrees above freezing. Wildlife here includes species the surrounding agricultural landscape can no longer support. Armadi...

Image: Margarida61 | CC BY-SA 3.0