Qualla: Serra Pelada

Serra Pelada: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hallel, CC BY-SA 4.0. They called themselves garimpeiros - prospectors - but Sebastiao Salgado, who photographed them in 1986, saw them for what they were: slaves without chains. Forty thousand men climbed wooden ladders out of a single hand-dug pit, each carrying a sixty-kilogram sack of ore on his back. They descended again, and again, and again - as many as 400 trips a day. The pit deepened. The ladders grew longer. When a man found a lode, he earned the right to wear a striped shirt. When a man slipped, the climb killed him, or the fall did, or the men below him did. This was not mining. This was a human anthill eating a mountain, and the world watched.

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Image: Hallel | CC BY-SA 4.0

Serra Pelada: How the Gold Rush Began

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hallel, CC BY-SA 3.0. In December 1979, a cowboy on the Tres Barras Farm in southeastern Para noticed something glinting in the Grota Rica stream. The farm belonged to a man named Genesio Ferreira da Silva. A local child, swimming downstream, pulled up a 6-gram nugget. Word moved fast. By the end of t...

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Image: Hallel | CC BY-SA 3.0

Serra Pelada: The Machine With No Machines

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hallel, CC BY-SA 4.0. Until 1989, the entire operation was artisanal, meaning hand-dug. No pickaxes driven by compressed air. No conveyor belts. No excavators. Men with shovels cut the ore loose. Men with sacks carried it up ramps, then - as the pit deepened - up ladders that rose like skeleton spines...

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Image: Hallel | CC BY-SA 4.0

Serra Pelada: The Major and the Massacre

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Túllio F, CC BY-SA 4.0. The chaos alarmed the military dictatorship of President Joao Figueiredo. In 1980, Major Sebastiao Rodrigues de Moura - known as Sebastiao Curio, a veteran of the Araguaia counterinsurgency - was appointed Interventor Federal, a kind of federal overlord. Curio banned women, alcoh...

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Image: Túllio F | CC BY-SA 4.0

Serra Pelada: What Salgado Saw

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Túllio F, CC BY-SA 4.0. When Sebastiao Salgado arrived at Serra Pelada in 1986, he was not the first photographer to visit. Most of those who came before him had stayed a day, shot in color, and left with a magazine spread. Salgado stayed four weeks and worked in black and white. His photographs - later...

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Image: Túllio F | CC BY-SA 4.0

Serra Pelada: The Pit Fills With Water

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Túllio F, CC BY-SA 4.0. By 1992 the mine was closed, officially because of deadly landslides, though many miners accused President Fernando Collor of yielding to pressure from multinational mining concerns who wanted the site themselves. The pit quickly filled with rainwater and became a polluted lake, ...

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Image: Túllio F | CC BY-SA 4.0