Grande Sertão Veredas

Grande Sertão Veredas National Park was created in 1989 in north-western Minas Gerais, beside the Bahia border, and takes its name from the novel by João Guimarães Rosa that made this sertão one of the most recognisable literary landscapes in Brazil. In 2004 the park was considerably enlarged from its original extent.

It protects a well-conserved sector of the Cerrado, with the complete mosaic of its physiognomies: campo limpo, campo sucio, cerrado sensu stricto, cerradão and gallery forest. Its most characteristic element is the veredas, formations that develop in the hollows where the water table reaches the surface and the ground stays waterlogged, dominated by the buriti palm (Mauritia flexuosa), which forms green lines cut against the dry savannah. Those veredas are the sources of the streams that feed the São Francisco basin and they concentrate much of the park's wildlife.

Among its inhabitants are emblematic and threatened Cerrado species: the maned wolf, the giant anteater, the giant armadillo, the marsh deer and the tapir, alongside an abundant birdlife. The park forms part of the mosaic of protected areas recognised within the Serra do Espinhaço Biosphere Reserve, designated by UNESCO in 2005. The region also has a strong cultural component associated with the geraizeira communities of the sertão, whose traditional uses of the land coexist with conservation.