Gold in Them Thar Hills

We are now well and truly in the area of Brazil called Minas Gerais and is/was the gold and gem mining area of South America. We started of in Sao Joao del Rei in a small hotel in the centre of this town. Most of the towns we have been through rose to prosperity in the 1700s when gold was discovered. All seem to have had many churches each one finely decorated with gold and paintings inside. The Portuguese rulers at the time tried to get large taxes on all the gold but various uprisings saw the area eventually go into decline but the old "colonnial" style buildings and churches remain so they may wonderful villages and towns now.
In Sao Joao we took an old train along the mining route to a nearby town of Tiradentes which was even more beautiful that Sao Joao.

Here the buildings are only one or two storeys high and colourfully painted but sometimes a little tacky especially when coupled with the pink "Heres Kitty" horse drawn taxi cabs in the cobbled streets.

After Sao Joao we headed over to Ouro Preto some 120miles away to what is claimed to be the prettiest town in South America. You certainly cannot deny it's quaintness. It was for many years the capital of the Minas Gerais region, a fabulously rich gold town back in the 17th Century and built in a steep sided valley with many huge gullies running up. The town is built on the sides of all these steep slopes and the cobbles streets can often seem near vertical to get up. Cars are everywhere including passageways you would not dream of going up or down in a car.

Around every corner or over every rise is another very ornately decorated church

The town is lit up at night so on the lookout for some night time pics later.
The hotel we are in here is the only modern building in the town and the Hotel was designed and built by Oscar Neimeyer in the late 1930s. Because the capital of Minas Gerais moved to Belo Horizonte in the 19th century the town has been left as it was in the "Colonial" era, narrow and steep roads old quaint buildings and large squares with loads of churches.

This area has been good to visit, not really on the "European" visitors circuit so a bit out of the ordinary