Sunny Brazil: Rei do Mato e Maquiné Grottoes

My cousin Douglas was talking about the beauty of two Grottoes he had visited some time ago, and invited Sven and I to check it out. Although this region has many grottoes, we decided to see only two of the most famous ones: "Rei do Mato" and "Maquiné".

In the agreed day, we left Belo Horizonte and traveled with the car for around 70 km north on the BR-040 (a federal highway), in the direction of a town called Sete Lagoas. The first grotto we wanted to visit was the "Rei do Mato" one and it took us a while to find the highway exit and after many returns and hardly any signs, we finally found the grotto.

So, the name of this first grotto in Portuguese - "Rei do Mato" - can be translated to English as "King of the Bushes". According to some people, the "Rei do Mato" was the nickname of a fugitive from a 1930’s Revolution and he decided to make it his own "house" and therefore lived there for several years. This Grotto has four large chambers with numerous stalactites, stalagmites and limestone dams. In the so called "Rarities Hall" are nearly identical parallel columns, which are more than 20 meters high, our guide said something about it being unique in the whole world.  In a small cave next to the Gruta Rei do Mato, 4,000 to 6,000-year-old cave paintings were discovered, as well as the skeleton of an extinct animal.

Afterwards, we drove in the direction of Cordisburgo, where the other grotto - Maquiné - is located. Before entering it, we decided that it was time to eat something and the restaurant in front of the entrance offered some good home food, although bloody expensive...

As we still had to wait a few minutes until the tour guide would take us around the grotto, we made some pictures of the outside:

Inside, the grotto is really impressive, especially because of its size, there are some pretty big chambers! The Maquiné Grotto is the oldest and one of the most visited grottoes in Brazil. It is located near Cordisburgo, a small town located 143 km northwest of Belo Horizonte. 

The grotto was discovered in 1825 by a farmer Joaquim Maria Maquiné (the landowner). It is world-famous for paleontological importance detected initially by a danish palaeontologist called Peter Lund, which remained inside the cave nearly two years doing his research on the Brazilian paleontology, describing all the chambers, explaining the formation of stalagmites and stalactites and examining human remains and petrifaction of animals. The cave has seven huge chambers, amounting to 650 linear meters and unevenness of the ground of only 18 meters. With an internal temperature ranging between 26°C and 27°C, it is essentially horizontal, forming a continuous gallery with an average width of 9 to 12 meters and height of 15 to 18 meters. Its galleries and halls are the result of the job of water for many millions of years. Here are some pictures we took:

On our way back to Belo Horizonte, something cool caught our attention. We passed right in front of an Elephant House. We heard the man who constructed it also lives there at the moment. Quite creative isn't it?  

Elephant house

The two grottoes were very beautiful, it's really fascinating when you think of how nature transforms itself with time and how many millions of years of changes and misteries they've been through...


We hope you enjoyed this post. As Sven has left back to London and I'm still staying in Belo Horizonte for a couple of weeks, I'll try to post more about Brazil and some other places we've been in the past! Thanks for reading!