Qualla: Vassununga State Park

Vassununga State Park: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sturm, CC BY-SA 4.0. It weighs an estimated 264 tons. Its trunk is 3.6 meters thick. Its longest root runs 30 meters sideways underground, and its deepest punches 18 meters straight down. Forty meters overhead, its crown catches the Cretaceous sun that once fell on dinosaurs. The tree is a jequitibá-rosa, Cariniana legalis, and the locals call it O Patriarca - the Patriarch. It has been standing here for approximately 600 years, which means it was already a sapling when Europeans first sighted the Brazilian coast. Most of the Atlantic Forest that once surrounded it has been cut for coffee and cattle. This grove survived because a sugar mill kept it as a woodlot. When the mill went bankrupt in 1969, the state of São Paulo stepped in.

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Image: Sturm | CC BY-SA 4.0

Vassununga State Park: How the Forest Was Saved

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bruna Leone Gagetti, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Vassununga Sugar Mill owned roughly 2,000 hectares of northeastern São Paulo in the 19th and 20th centuries. Like many Brazilian planters of the era, the mill's managers kept forest reserves scattered through the cultivated land - not out of early conservation ethics but for ...

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Image: Bruna Leone Gagetti | CC BY-SA 3.0

Vassununga State Park: The Giant's Foot

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 largest section, 900 hectares called Pé de Gigante - the Giant's Foot - takes its name from a broad depression in the landscape that, viewed from certain angles, suggests the imprint of something enormous. The cerrado here is unusually well preserved, which is why the section...

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

Vassununga State Park: Life in the Fragments

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Edumurad, CC BY-SA 4.0. The list of mammals recorded at Vassununga reads like a field guide to the Brazilian interior: maned wolf, cougar, capybara, bush dog, crab-eating raccoon, oncilla, tayra, neotropical otter, the pampas deer once nearly extirpated across this range, and the robust capuchin monkey ...

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Image: Edumurad | CC BY-SA 4.0

Vassununga State Park: The Road to the Patriarch

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Edumurad, CC BY-SA 4.0. The park sits along kilometer 245 of the Rodovia Anhanguera, the SP-330 highway, about 245 kilometers northeast of São Paulo in the municipality of Santa Rita do Passa Quatro. The Anhanguera itself traces an old bandeirante route - 17th-century Portuguese explorers, enslavers, an...

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Image: Edumurad | CC BY-SA 4.0