Serra do Cipó

Serra do Cipó National Park was created on 25 September 1984 by Decree 90,223, in the central portion of Minas Gerais, and takes in land in the municipalities of Jaboticatubas, Santana do Riacho, Morro do Pilar and Itambé do Mato Dentro. It is entirely surrounded by the Morro da Pedreira Environmental Protection Area, which acts as a buffer zone. Its creation followed a singular path: a state park was declared in 1978, but the government of Minas had no funds to pay the expropriations, so conservationists in the state, backed by the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science, campaigned for its transfer to the federal government, which acquired more than 40 % of the land by agreement before the 1984 decree.

The park lies at the southern end of the Serra do Espinhaço, the mountain chain that divides two great Brazilian basins, those of the São Francisco and the river Doce. Altitudes range from about 700 to 1,670 metres, and the relief is one of ridges, canyons, valleys, waterfalls and caves, with extensive campos rupestres on quartzite outcrops.

That poor, ancient substrate, combined with the isolation of the summits, has produced one of the most diverse floras on the planet, with more than 1,700 recorded species and a degree of endemism among the highest in the world: there are plants that exist nowhere else. The landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx christened it the Garden of Brazil in 1950. Three biomes also meet in the park — Cerrado to the west, Atlantic Forest to the east and campos rupestres — and threatened species such as the maned wolf, the giant anteater and the jaguar survive here. It is one of Brazil's leading fields for scientific study in botany, ecology, zoology, geology and archaeology. The Serra do Espinhaço was recognised by UNESCO as a Biosphere Reserve in 2005, and the park is one of its core areas.