Morro do Pai Inácio

From the flat top of Morro do Pai Inácio the northern Chapada Diamantina opens in every direction: a skyline of table mountains with sheer walls and level crowns, separated by broad green valleys. The hill itself is one of these mesas, rising to about 1,120 metres in the municipality of Palmeiras, in the interior of the Brazilian state of Bahia. A short, steep path of roughly half a kilometre climbs from the road to the summit plateau, and from the edge the neighbouring buttes line up like a row of stranded ships, glowing orange and then violet in the low evening light.

The landscape belongs to the Chapada Diamantina, an upland of folded and deeply eroded rock on the eastern side of the Bahian plateau, whose name recalls the diamonds found in its rivers in the mid-nineteenth century. The hill's name comes from a story set in the nineteenth century. Local tradition holds that an enslaved man called Pai Inácio fell in love with a lady of the landowning class; when the affair was discovered he fled and was cornered on this summit, carrying nothing but an umbrella. Rather than surrender, he leapt from the cliff, and the story says he opened the umbrella and floated safely down. The tale was retold in a short film, "A Lenda de Pai Inácio", in the 1980s.

The hill is protected as a municipal natural park and is listed in a regional register of archaeological, ethnographic and landscape heritage, reflecting interest in it from geologists, biologists, archaeologists and historians alike. From its rim the wider region can be read at a glance: an upland of folded, heavily eroded rock in which most ground lies between 500 and 1,000 metres, while isolated ranges climb much higher, cut apart by rivers into the separate flat-topped blocks seen all around. That combination of open horizon and layered relief has made the hill the best-known emblem of the Chapada Diamantina.

Getting there

Morro do Pai Inácio stands beside the BR-242 highway, about 26 km by road west of the town of Lençóis; the nearest town by straight line is Iraquara, about 28 km away. The closest airport with scheduled flights is Lençóis Airport (LEC), about 20 km from Lençóis on the plateau, with services from Salvador. The nearest larger regional airport, Vitória da Conquista (VDC), lies about 280 km to the south.