Tiradentes is a small colonial town in the hills of Minas Gerais, in south-eastern Brazil, where the paving is cobbled stone, the church is full of gold, and the streets run uphill toward the Serra de Sao Jose. It has about four and a half thousand people and a calendar crowded with festivals, and the bigger town next door, Sao Joao del Rei, with nearly eighty thousand, is where you find supermarkets and a wider choice of fuel stations.
The history starts with gold. In the eighteenth century prospectors poured into this region, and the Estrada Real, the Royal Road, was the route the Portuguese crown used to haul the metal to the ports of Paraty and Rio de Janeiro under tight control. The town was founded as Sao Jose del Rei and renamed after Joaquim Jose da Silva Xavier, nicknamed Tiradentes, the dentist who joined the Inconfidencia Mineira, a plot against Portuguese rule in 1789, and was hanged in Rio in 1792. He is a national hero, and Brazil marks the anniversary of his execution as a public holiday on the twenty-first of April. The Matriz de Santo Antonio, the main church, is a baroque jewel with an interior gilded in great quantity.
Riding in is slow by design. The roads around climb gently through green hills of coffee, cattle and eucalyptus, with short sections of broken asphalt and occasional potholes after the rains, and local drivers pass in surprising places. Cobbles in town are slippery after rain and rough on a loaded bike, so take it gently and park where the locals do. A steam train called the Maria Fumaca still runs the short route to Sao Joao del Rei on selected days, a nice thing to see even if you do not take it.
Food is the Mineira kind: feijao tropeiro with beans, sausage and cassava flour, pao de queijo, slow-cooked pork, and strong coffee, with cachaca from the region's distilleries. Cooler mornings in the dry season, around May to September, are the best time, while the rainy summer brings storms in the afternoon.