The name is Tupi: para katu, good river. Europeans were probing this stretch of backland by the end of the 16th century, but it was the discovery of gold and silver in the early 18th century that pinned a permanent settlement here. Gold had in fact been worked out of the local streams since 1722. Seventy-six years of prospecting, forced labour and royal taxation later, the crown issued a charter and the place became Vila de Paracatu do Príncipe in 1798 — a town of the Prince, out where the mountains of Minas soften into cerrado. It sits at 688 meters in a tropical savanna climate: a hot wet season, a warm dry one, and a horizon that goes on.

The famous colonial gold towns of Minas Gerais are vertical places. Ouro Preto and Diamantina climb and plunge; their churches perch. Paracatu is the flat one. Its historic core spreads across level ground, though the streets still wander in the irregular colonial manner rather than surrendering to a grid. Behind the whitewash are timber frames packed with adobe, the standard construction of the town's consolidation years, overlaid in the 19th and 20th centuries with eclectic facades as new money and new techniques arrived. On 10 December 2010, IPHAN — Brazil's national heritage institute — listed the centre and its roughly 230 protected buildings, citing not only the architecture but the town's part in settling the country's centre-west at the tail end of the gold cycle.

The gold that paid for those facades was not dug by the men whose names went on them. Paracatu's 18th-century wealth rested on enslaved Africans, worked in the stream beds and pits under conditions built to extract as much as possible before a body gave out. Some escaped into the surrounding hills. Others were freed as the placer deposits thinned through the 19th century. Out of both came the quilombos — settlements founded by people of African descent on land no one else had yet claimed. Five took shape as rural communities around Paracatu; three of them — São Domingos, São Sebastião, and Lagoa de Santo Antônio — remain vibrant today, their residents known as quilombolas, holding onto farming practice, festival calendars and family memory that run back to the century when the gold was still in the water. Their land claims have never been fully settled in Brazilian law.

Modern gold mining is a volume business. Morro do Ouro — Hill of Gold — came into production in the 1980s and has expanded sharply since 2006 under the Canadian company Kinross Gold, which runs it as Kinross Brasil Mineração: two processing plants, two tailings facilities, and a pit that reads from the air as a grey scallop bitten out of the green. Annual output runs near 15 tonnes of gold and 5 tonnes of silver; in 2015 the operation produced 477,662 gold-equivalent ounces. It is also the region's largest employer, which is precisely what makes arguments about it so hard to settle. Tailings have to go somewhere. According to an investigation by the Canadian NGO Above Ground, most of the Machadinho quilombo's territory is now occupied by mine structures and impoundments, and no quilombola families remain there today — the descendants of people forced to dig the first gold here were ultimately displaced by the machinery taking out the last of it.

Gold is not the only thing this landscape gives up. In 1978 the municipality began receiving investment through PRODECER, a Japanese-Brazilian programme to make the acidic cerrado soils farmable — the project that turned central Brazil into one of the world's great grain regions. Paracatu took to it thoroughly. More than 1,000 square kilometers are now under cultivation, of which about 300 are watered by 318 centre-pivot sprinklers, the largest continuous centre-pivot irrigated area in South America and unmistakable from a window seat: green circles tiled across red earth. Soybeans and corn lead, with rice, beans, cotton, sugarcane, watermelon and a little coffee filling in around them, alongside a cattle herd counted at 231,000 head in 1996. The city serves as commercial centre for a hinterland roughly a third the size of Portugal.