Qualla: Das Velhas River

Das Velhas River: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marta Macedo Kerr Pinheiro, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Rio das Velhas means, translated literally, the River of the Old Women. The name is strange enough that people ask. The Tupi-speaking peoples who lived along it called it Uaimii, in which gwaimi means old and the final i means river. The bandeirantes - the Portuguese slaving and prospecting expeditions that pushed into the interior in the 1600s - wrote it down as Guaicui and translated the meaning roughly into Portuguese. The river keeps the awkward 17th-century translation. It also keeps, embedded in its water, an entire history of Brazilian gold, Brazilian colonial violence, and Brazilian environmental reckoning.

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Image: Marta Macedo Kerr Pinheiro | CC BY-SA 4.0

Das Velhas River: The Road to the Gold

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Py4nf, CC BY-SA 4.0. Recent academic research argues that the das Velhas may have been the original path by which Brazilian gold was found. The conventional story has bandeirantes from Sao Paulo pushing north over the Serra da Mantiqueira. The revisionist version has prospectors from Brazil's northea...

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Image: Py4nf | CC BY-SA 4.0

Das Velhas River: War of the Emboabas

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit GMVR92, CC BY-SA 4.0. The gold was too much to share. The original Paulista discoverers - the bandeirantes - considered the mines theirs by right of discovery. The newcomers from Portugal and the northeast, whom the Paulistas called emboabas (a Tupi word for outsiders, often translated as feather-foot...

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Image: GMVR92 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Das Velhas River: Source at Ouro Preto, Mouth on the Sao Francisco

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. The river rises at the Andorinhas waterfall in the municipality of Ouro Preto - appropriately, in the town that became the most fabled of the gold-era boomtowns. From that headwater it runs northwest for roughly 800 kilometers, gathering tributaries from the iron-rich soils of ce...

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Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Das Velhas River: The Yellow Stretch

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Isaac daniel, CC BY-SA 3.0. In Greater Belo Horizonte the river is not what it was. A significant part of its water volume is diverted at the Agua de Bela Fama Water Treatment Station. Downstream of that, the Ribeirao Arrudas and the Onca streams - both of which drain directly through the city of Belo Horiz...

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Image: Isaac daniel | CC BY-SA 3.0

Das Velhas River: The Manuelzao Project

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Isaac daniel, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1997 the Medical Faculty of the Federal University of Minas Gerais did something unusual for a medical school - it launched a river restoration project. The Manuelzao Project, named for a traditional herdsman celebrated in Brazilian literature, set out to revitalize the entire...

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Image: Isaac daniel | CC BY-SA 3.0