Qualla: Romaria

Romaria: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The town used to be called Agua Suja - Dirty Water - after the muddy creek where prospectors found the first diamonds. It is now called Romaria, which is the Portuguese word for a pilgrimage. Few places state their business quite so directly. For most of the year Romaria holds about 3,500 people, one bank-free main street, and a great deal of coffee and corn. Then August arrives, the town vanishes under a crowd many times its own size, and the name stops being a curiosity and becomes a simple description of what is happening.

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Romaria: What They Found in the Creek

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The settlement began the way half the towns of the Alto Paranaiba began: someone washed gravel in a stream and found something hard and bright in the pan. The creek was the Agua Suja, a tributary of the Bagagem River, and the first diamond came out of it in 1857, a few years befo...

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Romaria: The Image from Portugal

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Along with the picks and the pans came a chapel, raised in honor of Nossa Senhora da Abadia, Our Lady of Abadia, with an image brought over from Portugal. The chapel of Nossa Senhora d'Abadia de Agua Suja anchored the growing settlement, and devotion to the image outlived the dia...

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Romaria: Ten Days in August

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The festival runs from August 6 to August 15, and the archdiocese of Uberaba counts it as the largest religious celebration in the Triangulo Mineiro. Pilgrims come on foot, on horseback, by bicycle, in cars and buses and ox carts, from across Minas Gerais and from other states, s...

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Romaria: A Municipality Named for a Verb

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Romaria became a municipality in its own right in 1962, and by then the new name had long since displaced Agua Suja in ordinary speech. It is a small jurisdiction, 402 square kilometers, with the town center sitting at 960 meters on the Alto Paranaiba plateau just north of BR-365...

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Romaria: The Other Eleven Months

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Between festivals, Romaria is farm country and nothing else. The red soil of the cerrado, corrected with lime and irrigated, grows some of the best coffee in Brazil; the municipality had 5,200 hectares of it in 2006, alongside 9,500 hectares of soybeans and 6,500 of corn, plus co...

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