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Beyond History
Text and photo: Marcelo JB Resende
Collaborator: Kelly Juliane Dutra (Turismo - UFOP)
English Version: Márcio Abdo de Freitas, MBA
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Visiting Ouro Preto is a hard
task for a medium. He might feel a strong
burden of human energy that lingers over its
churches and houses. All the same, it is not
necessary to be overly sensitive to realize
that one does not wander alone in this Minas
Gerais' town village. There is always something,
an imaginative shadow that follows by and might
whisper forceful words of love or hatred. Ouro
Preto is a fascinating model of what humanity
produced of best and worst. Here history weighs
on our shoulders.
A fabulous and lovely 18th-century town village
deeply stuck in the valleys of Minas Gerais' mountains.
Anachronistic, amazing, fascinating... Ouro Preto resurges
as a vision, a mirage amidst the dense mist of dawn. The
impression for first-time visitors is exciting. All of a
sudden, it seems as if a journey back in time is a reality.
A pilgrimage of the living mixing up with a pilgrimage of
the dead. Historical and anonymous personages spreading
fallacies and mixing themselves shoulder to shoulder to
the contemporaries.
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Ouro Preto is above goodness and evil. Those who won't be
able to realize this will not enjoy this town
accordingly. It is extremely humane, therefore
courageous and cruel. Cruelty has been written
in the darkened walls burned by whale oil of the
old gold mines. Slaves were forced to enter in
small openings and stay there all day long, breathing
smoke from the torches, smelling sweat from exhausted
bodies and the suffocating odor exhaling from urine
and excrements. Courage, by its turn, rests radiating
in the Hall of Freedom inside the town's main museum,
where the remains of those patriots who once dreamed
Independence of Minas Gerais and, at large, of Brazil
rest in solemnity.
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Ouro Preto is no place for
good-or-bad dualism. We just have to
send ourselves back to a time when there
were no laws, a chaotic soup-like mixture
of diverse interests that took its own
shape and gave birth to the first society
bearing modern characteristics in Brazil.
As the country was born at some point on
the maritime coast, its conception as a
nation actually took place in Minas Gerais.
Vila Rica was the Alma Mater and the
new-born nation was nurtured in Gold.
Due to its outstanding value, Ouro Preto was
decreed a National Historic Monument in 1933 by the brazilian
federal government. World eyes and recognition would come later
in 1980, when UNESCO declared this 18th-century old colonial
town village as a Cultural Heritage of Mankind. Ouro Preto
legacy well exceeds its borders, and its essence is the proper
essence of mankind.
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