Qualla: Piranguinho

Piranguinho: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eduardo P, CC BY-SA 3.0. On a Saturday in June 2026, thirty-two groups of children each took charge of one metre of candy. What they were guarding, laid out in a single unbroken slab through the middle of Piranguinho, was 32.2 metres of pé-de-moleque weighing 480 kilograms — roasted peanuts set in molten rapadura, cooled hard, measured, certified, then cut up and handed out to everyone who had come to watch. It was the nineteenth edition of the Festa do Maior Pé de Moleque do Mundo and it beat the town's own 31-metre mark from the year before, which had beaten the 30-metre mark from the year before that. The record is registered with Ranking Brasil rather than Guinness, which does nothing to dampen the local view of the matter. This town of roughly nine thousand people in southern Minas Gerais has decided what it is, and it is peanut brittle.

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Image: Eduardo P | CC BY-SA 3.0

Piranguinho: Maria Paulina's Bar

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HVL, CC BY-SA 3.0. The story starts in 1909, at a bar beside the railway station kept by a woman named Maria Paulina. She sold a sweet to passengers waiting for trains, and the recipe her family used was not the one most of Brazil knows. Elsewhere pé-de-moleque means peanuts bound in caramelised su...

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Image: HVL | CC BY-SA 3.0

Piranguinho: The Baroness and the Sleepers

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit WOtP, CC BY-SA 4.0. Piranguinho exists because of a railway that needed wood. In the late nineteenth century, under the empire of Dom Pedro II, coffee money was financing track across Minas Gerais under the banner of the Rede Mineira de Viação, and one planned line was to link Itajubá with Santa Rit...

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Image: WOtP | CC BY-SA 4.0

Piranguinho: The Sapucaí Valley

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Py4nf, CC BY-SA 3.0. The town lies in the valley of the Sapucaí river, in the green folds of southern Minas between the Mantiqueira range and the São Paulo border, where the climate stays mild most of the year and the mornings come up with mist in the low ground. BR-459 and MG-295 cut the town into s...

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Image: Py4nf | CC BY-SA 3.0

Piranguinho: A Year Measured in Metres

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mateussf, CC BY-SA 3.0. The festival calendar gives Piranguinho its shape. Rodeos run at the Centro Regional de Rodeio Paulo Max in each half of the year. July belongs to Santa Efigênia, the town's patron saint, and to the Catholic festa held in her name. But June is the one that draws the crowds — thre...

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Image: Mateussf | CC BY-SA 3.0