Grande Sertao Veredas National Park

The park takes its name from Joao Guimaraes Rosa's Grande Sertao: Veredas, the 1956 novel set in this landscape, and a vereda is the specific thing the title points at: a line of buriti palms marking where groundwater surfaces in the cerrado, forming a narrow wetland strip through otherwise dry savanna. The park protects about two thousand three hundred square kilometres of them, along with campo limpo grassland, cerradao woodland and gallery forest along the Preto River. Maned wolf, giant anteater, giant armadillo and marsh deer are here, and the birdlife of open cerrado is good. Visits run from Chapada Gaucha with local guides. It is remote, lightly visited and organised around the veredas rather than around viewpoints.

What you actually see

• Veredas - lines of buriti palms where groundwater reaches the surface.
• Open cerrado - grassland and woodland across 2,300 square kilometres.
• Cerrado mammals - maned wolf, giant anteater and marsh deer.
• Guimaraes Rosa's country - the landscape of the 1956 novel that named the park.

When to go

May to September, the dry season. Two days.

Honest expectations

Access is by 4x4 track from Chapada Gaucha and needs a guide arranged in advance. There is no accommodation inside. Distances are long, roads are sand and the dry season is dusty and hot. Wildlife is scattered and takes early starts.

Nearby

Chapada Gaucha is the base town; the Bahia border is north.