Ouro Preto

Today we woke up in our Ouro Preto Hotel. We are sharing rooms again and this time, the rooms are much smaller than in Brasilia but more expensive too. That is because it is the winter and because of the festival. Breakfast was not as lavish as we have enjoyed in our other hotels but the colonial makes up for it in atmosphere. The name Ouro Preto means “Black Gold” not named for oil but for the black ore mixed with gold found in the hills of this town. It was marked by a specific rock formation so that the Portuguese could return from Sao Paolo with their men to start mining gold in earnest. Over one third of the world’s gold has been found in this region. Ouro Preto just celebrated its 315th birthday and we are in the midst of a great music festival in town making for a very noisy and joyous street scene every night. The town has some of the steepest streets I have ever encountered making some of San Francisco’s streets seem nearly horizontal in comparison. It was pretty frightening to be going down a hill on the bus nearly vertically this morning. Luckily we had not had our cassacia (alcohol made from sugar cane – a Brazilian speciality) sampling nor lunch before that.
The strange thing about Ouro Preto is that gold mines are found throughout the town, over 300 of them I think. The mines were worked by African slaves brought into Brazil and hand-picked for their short stature and small size in contrast to the strong tall Africans who were brought to North America and even to Northern Brazil to work in the sugar cane fields. Mining is a dangerous job with high rewards for the owners and miserable working conditions for the workers. In fact, it was said by our local guide after we donned our mining hard hats and were deep into the mine tunnel that children as young as six were taken to work in the mines to carry out the rubble that the stronger and older workers picked through in their search for gold veins. With little air, moist and damp conditions , constant dust and long hours, most slaves had very short lives perhaps only to twenty years or so when they would have died from pneumonia, exhaustion, malaria, dengue fever or any number of other debilitating diseases. The slaves were freed in Brazil only in 1888. In contrast to Brasilia, Ouro Preto shows a much higher percentage of its population as black.
We visited the Church of Our Lady of Preto with a cemetery with many graves next to the church. We couldn’t take photos in the church which was a shame since the interior was covered with fabulous Baroque carvings and paintings. I walked around the cemetery and started taking photos of graves with family names on it like da Costa and Fernandes. There were quite a few da Costas, many of them relatively recent. The church is no longer restricted to former Africans but is made of a congregation of the poor. Our guide Claudio told us that where there is a poor congregation, there are many more graves. Three workmen were digging a grave today in fact; well, one was digging the grave while two other men were just sitting around observing. There were lots of flowers on the graves mainly plastic.
Right now, I am hearing church bells ringing – there are so many churches here in the baroque style as most were built in the 17th century. I can’t imagine how all the building material got here but of course, the answer is slave labor. This place is full of iron ore, you can see it in the black soil and the red stones. Pelgy and I went shopping with Claudio’s assistant Nicole, a Japanese Brazilian who lives here in town. We had gone as a group to a gem store where they served us free capirinhas (Brazil’s native drink) and we each got a lottery number. The winner would get a free gem (a blue topaz) – the prize went to Pat. It was a nice stone but a setting had to be purchased and since gold is so high in price now, it cost a lot. I think she chose to just get the setting for a pendant and skipped the chain as it would have cost her around $500 American dollars.
I decided right then that I liked silver; even the gemstones that I was seeing were pretty high in price. The drink was nice though. We had lunch hosted by Fulbright today at an all you can eat place – we descended down many stairs and dined in a mine like stone cellar. Here in the southern part of Brazil we are seeing many more vegetables than fruits, no more Belo Souza Leiao cake for breakfast, and now an emphasis on pork. There is still the beans and rice dish brought to Brazil by the Africans with pork added by the Portuguese to make a national Afro-Brazilian dish.
After lunch we visited another church, this time, a rich church with balconies for the very rich so that they could be separate from the ordinary wealthy people below in the nave. All the walls were covered with wood carvings gilded to the hilt with numerous angels, saints, foliage and flowers. I noticed that some of the angels had one leg hanging over a ledge, others were just heads with strangely attached necks that didn’t look anatomically correct. The strangest phenomenon in this church was that several holy figures (Virgin Mary and Christ for example) had human hair. It made me wonder who donated the light brown locks? It reminded me of the glorious curled long hair that Saint Theresa of Lisieux’s father saved when her hair was cut just prior to her postulancy in the covent. The Madonna had the infant Christ in front of her, standing buck naked with rosy cheeks. Some of the angels had delightfully windblown hair and pink pursed lips. Since we couldn’t take photos, you will have to be satisfied with my inadequate descriptions. I don’t quite understand why we can’t take pictures but it might have to do with flash damaging the paint and/or gilding.
The visit to the church followed our cassacia tasting. Purportedly, sugar cane liquor from a town called Salinas has the best quality cassacia. No one knows whether it is due to the hot weather, the soil, or the rainfall but the distillation produces an almost smoky product that is best drunk straight rather than made into a capirinha. As everyone else was tasting the different varieties, I found a type called Passavara made with ginger and cinnamon and some herb that is supposed to invigorate one and create sexual energy as well. I liked the spicy taste and the fact that it was in a smaller plastic bottle; then I discovered that it only cost 5$ Rais each – the perfect little nightcap or medicinal drink for say, a sore throat or cold.