Qualla: Sumidouro State Park

Sumidouro State Park: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit copagov, CC BY-SA 2.0. Peter Wilhelm Lund came from Denmark in the early nineteenth century to catalog the animals of Brazil. What he found beneath the limestone hills north of Belo Horizonte was stranger than zoology. In the caves of what is now Sumidouro State Park, Lund pulled human bones from the same sediment layers that held the bones of extinct megafauna - ground sloths the size of elephants, sabre-toothed cats, ancient horses. Humans and monsters together, in the same grave. The coexistence was cited by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species. The skulls Lund excavated were shipped to Copenhagen, where some remain today.

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Image: copagov | CC BY-SA 2.0

Sumidouro State Park: A Sinkhole Gives the Park Its Name

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rafael Rodrigues Camargo, CC BY-SA 4.0. Sumidouro means sink - the place where water disappears. The lagoon at the park's heart drains through a network of underground galleries into the limestone basin beneath, carrying away whatever the rain gathers. The 2,004-hectare park sits in the municipalities of Lagoa Santa an...

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Image: Rafael Rodrigues Camargo | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sumidouro State Park: Luzia, 11,500 Years Old

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thiago S. Silva, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the 1970s, researchers working in the Lagoa Santa region found something that rewrote the timeline of human presence in the Americas. A skeleton they called Luzia, found in one of the caves near the park, dated to 11,500 years ago - old enough to change what everyone thought t...

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Image: Thiago S. Silva | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sumidouro State Park: A Slow Birth for a Protected Place

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andre Oliveira, CC BY 2.0. Governor Francelino Pereira signed decree 20.375 on 3 January 1980 creating the Sumidouro State Park. Little happened for decades. The park existed on paper but not on the land. Funding became available in 2006 as environmental compensation for the highway connecting Belo Horizon...

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Image: Andre Oliveira | CC BY 2.0

Sumidouro State Park: A Limestone Vault Six Hundred Million Years Old

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rafael Rodrigues Camargo, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Gruta da Lapinha is the park's showpiece cave - a chamber 511 meters long and up to 40 meters deep, carved from a limestone massif that formed roughly 600 million years ago when an ancient sea covered this part of South America. The massif has been dissolving ever since, drop...

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Image: Rafael Rodrigues Camargo | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sumidouro State Park: The Peter Lund Museum

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Raquel Mendes Silva, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2012, nearly two centuries after Lund first descended into these caves with a lantern, the park inaugurated the museum that bears his name. Eighty fossils from the Natural History Museum of Denmark came home - at least on loan, at least for display - to the landscape where the...

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Image: Raquel Mendes Silva | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sumidouro State Park: Trails Into Deep Time

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Berguerra, CC BY-SA 3.0. Visitors can book three guided trails. The Lapinha circuit, forty to sixty minutes, loops around the limestone massif beside the main cave, passing through the Macumba cave and revealing the karst relief. The ninety-minute Sumidouro trail starts at Casa Fernão Dias, passes the Cr...

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Image: Berguerra | CC BY-SA 3.0