In 1729, a Portuguese landowner named Antônio Pereira dos Santos — a man who held a large number of enslaved people — received a sesmaria, a royal land grant, from the Portuguese crown. His sesmaria covered the left bank of the Araçuaí River and the right bank of the Jequitinhonha, a vast territory in what was then called Minas Novas. The grant was not made on empty land. It was made over the territory of the Aranã people, whose lives and language had shaped this country for centuries before any Portuguese name was written down. Into this contested landscape came the garimpeiros, hunting for gemstones in the red riverbeds. And at some point — the date is not recorded, only its consequence — the image of Our Lady of Lapa was discovered in a nearby cave. A settlement grew around the discovery: São Domingos do Araçuaí, the early name for what is now Virgem da Lapa.

In 1891 the settlement was annexed to the municipality of Araçuaí, administered from the larger town downriver. That arrangement lasted more than half a century. On 27 December 1948, Virgem da Lapa was emancipated as a separate municipality — a small moment in the vast twentieth-century reorganisation of Brazilian local government, but a meaningful one for the town itself. Autonomy meant a mayor, a town council, and the right to direct local affairs from the hill overlooking the Jequitinhonha rather than from the old colonial seat two valleys over. Today the municipality covers 871 square kilometres and is home to about 13,740 people, according to the 2020 IBGE count. Its neighbours — Rubelita, Josenópolis, Grão Mogol, Berilo, Francisco Badaró, Araçuaí, Coronel Murta — form a rosary of small towns along the middle Jequitinhonha, each with its own patron saint, its own festival, its own variant of caatinga cuisine.

The Jequitinhonha River flows through the municipality, giving Virgem da Lapa its water and its history; the Araçuaí River marks the border with Francisco Badaró to the south. Both are rivers of the drought-prone sertão, with strong wet-season flows and long dry seasons that draw them down to braided channels across sand. BR-367, the federal highway that stitches the middle Jequitinhonha valley together, is the main road into town. From BR-367 you can reach Araçuaí downriver in under an hour, and eventually, via several changes, the state capital Belo Horizonte a full day's drive to the south. The landscape on either side of the highway is classic middle-valley Minas: buriti palms along the watercourses, thorny caatinga scrub on the slopes, small cattle operations in the valleys, and the occasional patch of subsistence farming.

Every August, Virgem da Lapa holds its Festa de Agosto, the town's main annual celebration — a festival in honour of Our Lady of Lapa, the patron saint whose discovered image gave the town its name and who is also the patron of the broader Diocese of Araçuaí. Pilgrims and romeiros travel from surrounding municipalities, filling the streets around the central square. Avenida Castelo Branco lines up with street vendors — pastel, caldo de cana, doce de buriti — and in the evenings nationally known Brazilian artists perform on an outdoor stage. It is, like many festas de padroeiro in rural Brazil, simultaneously a religious event and a commercial one, a Mass followed by a forró band, a candle lit inside the church and a cold Antarctica beer drunk outside. The festival draws this scattered community back to its centre once a year.

The municipal GDP is about R$162.6 million, of which more than half — 52.3% — comes from public administration. Services account for another 36.1%, agriculture and livestock for 7.3%, industry for 4.3%. Per-capita GDP works out to roughly R$13,800 a year. Those figures describe a town that depends heavily on government employment and government transfers, and that survives in a part of Minas Gerais where private-sector growth is slow. But figures are not the whole picture. The Aranã people are still here, recognised by the federal government; the old sanctuary built near the cave is still standing; the Jequitinhonha still rolls through town, wide in wet season, narrow in dry. The pilgrimage still happens every August. The town continues.