Serra do Rio do Rastro

Interesting facts

The road climbs from about 200 metres to roughly 1,460 metres through some 284 tight curves stacked on the escarpment.

The route began as a mule track; a road was proposed in the late 1920s, but it opened to traffic, still unpaved, only in the mid-1950s.

In the 1980s the mountain section was surfaced with concrete, which grips tyres better than asphalt when ice forms near the top in winter.

Seventeen concrete markers along the road label each rock layer of the White Column, from coal-bearing beds at the foot to lava basalts at the crest.

Israel Charles White's 1908 report recorded Mesosaurus fossils here and matched the rocks with South Africa's Karoo Basin, across the Atlantic.

The Rio do Rasto layers on the slope were laid down about 266 to 254 million years ago in lakes and rivers of the Permian period.

The rock formation named after the range has yielded Permian animals such as the sabre-toothed plant-eater Tiarajudens and the predator Pampaphoneus.

Near the top, Morro da Ronda reaches about 1,507 metres, and from there clear days reveal Morro da Igreja, at 1,822 metres one of the state's highest peaks.

The name translates roughly as "mountain range of the river of the track", while geologists officially spell the formation Rio do Rasto.

Why it is worth it

On the edge of the Santa Catarina plateau in southern Brazil, the land drops abruptly towards the coastal plain, and road SC-390 descends this escarpment in a tight ribbon of hairpin bends stacked one above another down the forested slope. Seen from the viewpoint at the top, at about 1,420 metres, the road appears as a looping grey line pinned to the side of the mountain, with ridges and canyons falling away below; on clear days the view reaches as far as the Atlantic, roughly 100 km away. The Serra do Rio do Rastro is the main mountain pass linking the Catarinense coast with the highlands, and a poll by a Spanish magazine once singled out its road as the most spectacular in the world.

The climb begins at Guatá, a district of Lauro Müller at the foot of the range, a coal-mining municipality settled largely by Italian immigrants in the late nineteenth century. From there the road passes through dense Atlantic Forest, home to howler and capuchin monkeys, coatis, small wild cats and toucans, then through stunted cloud forest and rock-face vegetation near the crest. Above the rim, on the side of Bom Jardim da Serra, the landscape changes to highland grassland broken by stands of Paraná pine. Winters here are cold by Brazilian standards: frosts are common on the heights and snow occasionally falls.

The slope is also a classic geological section. Climbing the road, one crosses in sequence the layers of the Paraná Basin, laid down when the region was part of the supercontinent Gondwana – coal-bearing sandstones near the bottom, then shales, Permian beds of the Rio do Rasto Formation, which shares its name with the range, the wind-blown sandstones of the Botucatu Formation and, at the top, the Cretaceous basalts of the Serra Geral lava flows. The sequence is known as the White Column after the American geologist Israel Charles White, who led a Brazilian government commission studying the region's coal between 1904 and 1906 and published his report in 1908; it established names still used for the basin's rock units and recorded fossils of the reptile Mesosaurus. Concrete markers along the road identify the individual outcrops, and Brazil's commission for geological and palaeontological sites has listed the Serra as one of the country's geological sites.

Getting there

The pass is crossed by state road SC-390, which runs between Lauro Müller, about 15 km to the east at the foot of the escarpment, and Bom Jardim da Serra on the plateau, continuing towards São Joaquim. The town of Urussanga is about 25 km away. The nearest airport is Lages (LAJ), about 100 km away in a straight line.

Serra do Rio do Rastro

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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