The park covers five municipalities in northern Minas Gerais: Rio Pardo de Minas, Porteirinha, Mato Verde, Riacho dos Machados, and Serranópolis de Minas. Belo Horizonte is 640 kilometers to the south. Inside the park boundary, several rivers rise: the São Gonçalo, the Ventania, the Suçuarana, the Bomba, the Ladim, the Córrego da Velha. The Mosquito River cuts through the Serra do Talhado, a ridge that was added to the park in the 2008 expansion. The attractions are water too: Cachoeira do Serrado, Poço do Jacaré, Poço da Sereia - waterfalls and pools fed by springs that, above some of these ridges, bubble up directly from Precambrian rock. Visitors are told to stay clear of the watercourses at the first sign of rain. Mountain weather in the sertão does not negotiate.

The dominant vegetation is campos rupestres - rupestrian fields - a category that sounds generic but in the Espinhaço means something very specific. Rocky, open meadows grow on quartzite outcrops at altitudes between 900 and 2,000 meters, baked by equatorial sun and swept by wind. Most of the plants are small, tough, and in many cases endemic to a single mountain range. Among them stand native trees with Tupi-Guarani names that have outlasted most of their species' original range: jataipeba, aroeira, sucupira. Lower down, cerrado savanna takes over - another globally threatened ecosystem, cleared across most of central Brazil for soybeans and cattle. The Espinhaço Complex is listed as threatened by agriculture, which is a polite way of saying the land outside the park boundary is rapidly becoming something else.

The fauna list reads like a who's-who of Brazilian dry country. Cougars. Maned wolves, the lanky orange canid that is more stilts than wolf. Crab-eating foxes. Tufted capuchins moving through the gallery forests along the streams. Southern tamanduas, the climbing anteater. Helmeted manakins - small black-and-red birds that display in understory leks. Hummingbirds, salamanders, boa constrictors coiled in sun-warm rock crevices. Rattlesnakes. Coral snakes with their warning rings of black and red. Bothrops jararacussu - a pit viper whose bite can kill if antivenom is not reached in time. In 2007, researchers from PUC Minas surveying the amphibians of Serra Nova recorded 27 species; at least one of them appeared to be new to science, the kind of finding that still happens in the rockier folds of Minas Gerais and reminds Brazilian biologists why this terrain keeps earning protection.