The park sits on the northern reach of the Serra do Espinhaço, the long quartzite spine that runs up the middle of Minas Gerais. Rock that hard absorbs very little, so what falls in the wet season collects in fractures and leaks back out slowly across the dry months. The Itacambiruçu and the Ventania drain this high ground, and both feed the Jequitinhonha basin on its long run to the Bahian coast. Three tablelands — the Chapada do Bosque, the Chapada do Bosquinho and the Chapada do Cardoso — make up the catchment that collects it all. Downstream, in a region where drought organises everything about rural life, those headwaters matter more than any single species the park was drawn around.

Campo rupestre is the technical name, and it describes one of the strangest plant communities on the continent: grassland on rock, where almost nothing has soil worth the word. The plants solve that by staying small, hoarding water and taking their time. Canelas-de-ema, the palm-like Velloziaceae, rise straight out of the stone on trunks built from their own dead leaf bases. Sempre-vivas — everlastings, of the family Eriocaulaceae — carpet entire slopes with dry papery flower heads that keep their shape for years after cutting. Orchids turn up in surprising variety; in March 2026 researchers described a new one from inside the park, endemic to it and already flagged as endangered before most people had heard the name. Lower down, the mosaic shifts: cerrado on the flats, shrubby caatinga with bromeliads and cactus where it gets driest of all.

The animal most associated with this landscape is the maned wolf, which is neither a wolf nor a pack animal — a long-legged solitary canid built for seeing over tall grass, with a diet that runs heavily to fruit. Giant anteaters work the termite mounds on the plateaus, rocking along at a pace that looks slower than it is. Giant armadillos dig burrows so substantial that other species move in behind them. Ocelots and cougars hunt the valleys, mostly unseen. Nearly all of them appear on threatened-species lists, which says less about the park than about the land around it. The cerrado has been cleared hard for pasture and crops, and an intact block of this size does work out of proportion to its area.

The town of Grão Mogol exists because of stones. Diamonds were found at the end of the eighteenth century, the strike was rich enough that the Portuguese crown took over the workings, and prospectors arrived from across Brazil and beyond. By 1858 the settlement was a city, and for decades it was the most important one in the north of the state. Then the diamonds thinned out, and after 1960 so did the population. Running through the park is a stone-paved track from that era, laid by enslaved workers to link the Fazenda do Cafezal to the town. Several stretches survive intact — fitted stone, drainage, gradients solved by hand across broken country. The estate belonged to the Baron of Grão Mogol, a title held by exactly one man, Guálter Martins Pereira. The road is listed as an attraction, and the engineering deserves it. It is also a record of forced labour, built by people whose names nobody wrote down and who kept none of what it carried. Both things are true while you are walking it. The Curral de Pedras, a stone corral of similar vintage, stands nearby.

Decree 39,906 created the park on 22 September 1998 with 33,324 hectares; a second decree in 2009 redrew the boundary to the present 28,404. Minas Gerais runs it through the Instituto Estadual de Florestas and classes it IUCN category II, the same tier as a national park, with a mandate covering wildlife, plant life, watersheds, research and a controlled form of tourism. For years that last part stayed theoretical: as recently as 2015 the gates opened only for scheduled research and school groups. Access has since widened to the canyons, the waterfalls, the Córrego das Mortes and the swimming spot known as Praia do Vau. It is still a place you plan for. The road in matters, the season matters, and when a ranger talks to you about carrying water, it is not small talk.