CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
A one-way ride of 1035 km, Diamantina to Paraty - roughly 16 h 43 in the saddle. The stops in between: Mariana, Ouro Preto and Tiradentes. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 1,250 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. It suits an unhurried touring pace.
Expect company on a summer weekend. Early is better than fast. For about 11 km this is Estrada Real Core Route, a road with a name of its own and a reason for it.
Diamantina earned its name the hard way. In the early 1720s, prospectors in the hills of Minas Gerais found diamonds in the gravel of the streams, and for the next hundred years this high, rocky corner of Brazil supplied most of the world's stones. The Portuguese Crown clamped down at once, declaring a restricted diamond district, with a monopoly on trade, permits, soldiers and informers, and the town that grew up at the centre of it, on a cold plateau in the Serra do Espinhaço at around 1,200 metres, became rich and strange. Today it has about thirty-seven thousand people, and the colonial centre was inscribed by UNESCO in 1999.
Read the complete Diamantina write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Diamantina is where the day begins. Next is Mariana.
Mariana is where Minas Gerais begins, at least on paper. It was the first town the Portuguese founded in the gold country, in 1696, and later the first capital and first bishopric of the whole captaincy. It was named for Maria Anna of Austria, the queen of João V, which tells you who the town was meant to impress. Today it sits at around seven hundred metres in a bowl of green, forested hills, a calm university and mining town of some forty-five thousand people, and it is the natural place to begin the Estrada Real, the old colonial road along which gold and diamonds went to the coast and everything else came back up.
Read the complete Mariana write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Mariana comes up about 398 km into the recorded legs. Next is Ouro Preto.
Ouro Preto means black gold, after the dark, iron-stained nuggets that set off the rush here at the end of the seventeenth century. For a while this town, then called Vila Rica, was among the richest and most populous places in the Americas, and its money went into churches, bridges, fountains and the steep, tilted streets you will be climbing and descending. UNESCO listed it in 1980, among the very first Brazilian sites, and walking in the centre you can see why: hardly a modern building disturbs the skyline of terracotta roofs and whitewashed towers climbing the hillsides.
Read the complete Ouro Preto write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 409 km into the recorded legs you reach Ouro Preto. Next is Tiradentes.
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.
Read the complete Tiradentes write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Tiradentes, late in the day. Next is Paraty.
Paraty is a small colonial town on a bay of the Costa Verde, where the Serra do Mar mountains drop in green folds to a sea scattered with islands. It was a port of the gold rush in the eighteenth century, when gold from Minas Gerais came down a mule trail through the forest, the Caminho do Ouro, and was loaded here for the voyage to Rio and then Lisbon. The town is remarkably well preserved, with whitewashed houses with coloured door frames, a handful of churches, and streets paved with big uneven stones that are laid, so they say, to let the sea flush them clean at the highest tides.
Read the complete Paraty write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Finish at Paraty. That is the ride.
Diamantina → Mariana is 398 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Mariana → Ouro Preto is 11 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Ouro Preto → Tiradentes is 156 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Tiradentes → Paraty is 469 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.