Parque Natural do Caraça

Mountain park 100 km east of the city with hiking trails, waterfalls, and a 19th-century monastery

Parque do Caraça is a 113-square-kilometre reserve of high Atlantic Forest about a hundred kilometres east of Belo Horizonte. The original draw is the Caraça Sanctuary, a nineteenth-century monastery and school complex built on a remote mountain plateau, with a striking neo-Gothic chapel and accommodation that is now run as a hotel.

Around the monastery, marked trails wind through cloud forest to waterfalls, caves, and high peaks. The most famous attraction is in the evenings: maned wolves regularly come to the steps of the monastery to eat, and visitors can watch from a designated area. A full day's day trip is possible; an overnight is much better.

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A story
The wolves come to the steps. At nightfall most evenings, the resident maned wolves of the surrounding Atlantic Forest emerge from the trees to eat scraps of food left on the doorstep of the old monastery by the Brothers — a habit that began in the 1980s and has never quite stopped.

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