Comuna do Ibitipoca, Brazil – a serious health warning and hugging monkeys

By Simon Heyes

 

Comuna do Ibitipoca in Brazil should come with a serious warning. Beware, you may well fall head over heels in love with this place and won’t want to leave. Travel insurance will not cover this. You will feel amazing (or your money back) and embarassingly may even break into song. Return visits to Brazil will be required.

 

This was my fourth visit to this bewitching corner of Minas Gerais and every time I want more. And now with new accommodation options – aka Remote Places – you can get lost in the spectacular wider Reserve!

 

 

 

 

There is so much positive energy and eco-inspiration going on at this private reserve a 3 ½ hour drive from Rio that it can make you dizzy. Theirs is a unique and deeply satisfying recipe of conservation, art, sustainability, and rural regeneration – and for those lucky enough to visit, adventure with exceptional hospitality. Stunning natural beauty is shown off to its best with love by charming, proud local guides. Guests stay in beautifully restored country accommodation with deeply nourishing organic, wood cooked Mineiro cuisine. It’s a truly heady mix.

 

 

5 days for our family just wasn’t long enough. Enough time to disconnect from the outside world, but never enough time to explore pristine hidden waterfalls at every turn or for riding, mountain biking (optionally electric, serious fun) and walking amongst contrasting landscapes of mountains, sand dunes and tropical forest. Never enough time for days beginning with pre-breakfast family yoga supervised by a rescued toucan and macaw, or for massages in remote locations reached only by 4×4, foot or horse. Inspiring warm local people, community micro businesses. Surprises at every turn, art installations to leave you speechless.

 

 

My family spent 2 nights in Casa de Carlinhos – a beautiful private 3 bedroom house set above Fazenda do Engenho, the Reserve’s main hotel – then ventured further afield exploring the new rustic, utterly charming accommodation options in the lost village of Mogol (Humboldt Loft and now Freud – see photo below).

 

 

Then we journeyed right across the other side of the reserve to distant, bewitching Areião. Waterfalls to plunge in at every turn, to backdrops of monkey puzzle trees and mountains. And as you travel round the reserve the landscapes change, reminiscent of Brazil’s Chapada Diamantina at times and even recalling distant memories of scaling magical cloud shrouded tepuis in Venezuela.

 

 

One morning at Areião my wife and I woke before dawn and opening the wooden shutters looked down across the rolling hills and cloud shrouded valleys of Minas – slowly revealing themselves – towards the iconic peaks above Rio. We simply had to wake the children to see it; then I walked an hour as the sun climbed to a simple country house called Luna, where researchers have based themselves for the last few years to study the fascinating and endangered northern muriqui spider monkey. The muriqui is the largest non-human primate in the Americas, can reach 5 feet in length with a life span of 40 years and moves between trees with incredible speed and agility. Unlike us they are a natural reforestation agent, living in groups with have no social hierarchy. Like some of us, they are serial huggers. No that’s not a mistype, wonderfully and rather poignantly they are known to “hug each other for everything; when feeling threatened, whether sad, happy or hungry…they hug on the ground as well as when hanging from tree tops with their strong tails.” A symbolic animal species for Brazil (and a favourite of mine… along with sloths of course). 

 

 

 

**June 2019** the two isolated males captured and relocated to a large enclosure where 2 females have been introduced. We hope for news of relationships formed, so far it appears just friendships. More iconic species re-wildings are planned at Ibitipoca!

 

The hope is that soon there will be a circuit that goes all the way round the state park massif that the Comuna embraces and aims to protect. That rural depopulation can be stemmed through creating a sustainable, local tourism economy. In Mogol where only 15 families remain, I found locals optimistic for the future, and a vision of rural regeneration breathing life back into a place where real local people would live alongside scientists, artists and poets – a village dreaming of a sustainable future for the world.

 

Ibitipoca is a rare and beautiful thing. Go!

 

 

 

 

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