Cachoeira Santa Bárbara

Santa Bárbara is a single curtain of water about 30 metres high that drops off a rock ledge into a round pool of startling blue. The colour is the reason the falls became one of the best-known sights of the Chapada dos Veadeiros highlands in northern Goiás: the pool, between one and five metres deep, has a pale bottom and very clear water, so in strong sunlight it shifts from turquoise near the edges to deep blue beneath the fall. Around it lies the cerrado, the open savanna woodland of central Brazil, cut here by low ridges and countless streams; the surrounding municipality alone counts well over a hundred waterfalls.

The falls belong to Engenho II, one of the settlements of the Kalunga people. The Kalunga descend from enslaved Africans who escaped from the gold workings of eighteenth-century Goiás into the remote valleys of the region, where their communities lived largely cut off for generations and developed their own blend of African, rural Catholic and Indigenous traditions. In 1991 the state of Goiás created the Kalunga Historical Site and Cultural Heritage area, which covers roughly 253,000 hectares across the municipalities of Cavalcante, Monte Alegre de Goiás and Teresina de Goiás and is the largest quilombola territory in Brazil. In 2021 it became the first site in Brazil entered in the United Nations registry of territories and areas conserved by Indigenous peoples and local communities. Visits to the waterfall are led by guides from the community itself, and the neighbouring Capivara falls, formed by two large drops, lie close by.

The nearest town, Cavalcante, grew out of the same gold rush that brought enslaved labour to the region. Prospectors arrived in 1736 and found gold along the Lava Pés stream; the settlement took the name of its founder, Julião Cavalcante. The deposits were exhausted by the early nineteenth century and the town turned to cattle and farming, keeping a few traces of its colonial architecture. Today it is known mainly as a gateway to the waterfalls of the northern Chapada dos Veadeiros and to the Kalunga communities.

Getting there

The waterfall lies about 30 km north of Cavalcante by unpaved road through the Kalunga territory; the larger town of Minaçu is about 79 km away in a straight line. The nearest airport is Brasília International Airport (BSB), about 260 km away in a straight line; Cavalcante is around 330 km from Brasília by road.