Relatos de Ouro

       REMEMBRACE

        After travelling to Minas Gerais, Joice, Fabiele and Marcos decided to reunite themselves this weekend to talk about their experiences and impressions, which are available below.

Ouro Preto

           The known historical city of Ouro Preto brings in its streets houses and monuments that are an important part of the Brazilian history.  Constructions that immortalize the golden age. Houses that depict the labor of slaves at that time. Since those times until today a few physical aspects of the city changed.  

         By being one historical current patrimony, the number of visitors increased. The population has grown and the economy has stabilized. The appearance of a modern city is blocked in Ouro Preto with green walls. The people no longer feel owners of their homes, but owners of a piece of Brazil’s patrimony. But, there are slums around the beautiful city, maybe an example that inequality will always exist.

          The large amount of cars shows that this city has something from the twenty-first century, but the food  deliciously remind us of the past, due to the simplicity. The people effectively lead a life very different from the life in the past, with different professions as well. Nevertheless one thing is certain: It seems that this beautiful city stopped in time.

 Fabiele Nery

Peculiarities of Natal and Ouro Preto

The Bandeirantes, coming from São Paulo, were financed by the Portuguese crown or even by privates entities to explore the Brazilian territory. Initially, their main objective was to capture Indians for the purpose of keeping the slave Portuguese regime. However, in the beginning of the XVII century, this situation changed: the biggest interest was, definitely, to find precious stones. In this context appears Ouro Preto, and it’s a city that takes features different from the other cities of Minas Gerais due to the high quantities of gold found there.

Differently from Ouro Preto, the city I come from, Natal, in Rio Grande do Norte, didn’t have the colonization impulse by the gold, but by military reasons. The Portuguese newly installed there built the “Forte dos Reis Magos” for the purpose of protecting themselves from occasional invasions from the French or the Dutch. One of the reasons for these invasions was the existence of Pau-Brazil. After this, a small town started to form that would originate Natal on December, twenty-fifth, 1599.

                Natal’s area is much bigger than Ouro Preto’s, because the first has 52 796,791 km² while the latter has 1 245,114 km². As far as the altitude is concerned of the both cities, Ouro Preto is approximately 10 turns higher than Natal. Moreover, the capital “potiguar” has a hot and wet tropical climate while the historic city has a high altitude tropical climate.

The religion with more followers in both cities is the Christian Catholic. The most important economic activity is Ouro Preto is mining, though the city is a strong touristic pole due to the National Heritage sites. In Natal, the most important activity is tourism, and the second one is the textile industry. This is due to the fact that the “Sun City” has one of the most beautiful Brazilian coastlines, the biggest cashew tree in the world, a NASA launching base and the biggest out of time Brazilian carnival, the “Carnatal”.

As it happened to most mining cities, Ouro Preto wasn’t different, because it’s traditional for the population to eat cheese bread, milk caramel, “tropeiro” beans, Minas cheese, tutu à la Mineira and so on. In Natal, the food is very different from Ouro Preto, because is usual to eat manioc, “Carne de Sol”, “paçoca”, coalho and butter cheese, feijoada, tapioca and cuzcuz. The cities’ architecture is very different. While Ouro Preto is characterized by the Barroco and Rococó, Natal doesn’t have a particular style.

At the end, each of the cities has peculiarities, and each is influenced by the customs and traditions of the region where it’s inserted.  However, I wouldn’t like to live in Ouro Preto because the cost of life there is higher than Natal and there are no beaches there, a thing that I like so much. In truth, I wouldn’t like to live in other Brazilian city that isn’t in Rio Grande do Norte.

 Joice Freitas

Ouro Preto: Past and Present

In the early years of colonization in Brazil, the main economic activities revolved around the exploration of Brazilian wood and sugar mills. In the late seventeenth century, however, the Bandeirantes found gold in the area that later would be known as Minas Gerais.

With this economic shift, social changes also came in a process of transition from a paralyzed society to a more vibrant one. That happened because the mix of people from different cultures was intense, be they from Portugal, from São Paulo, from Africa or from the native indigenous population, which resulted in a dynamic environment of intense commercial and cultural exchanges.

In this space, the mining activity was responsible for all rules. The people of that time had a profound ambition for gold, which made all jobs be related directly or indirectly to gold exploration. This means that, every day, population contingents walked to the mines to work much more than they could and should.

Furthermore, it is important to understand that there were few places for leisure activities and little free time. Thus, the Church - here representing both the space and the institution - functioned as the main mode of entertainment, besides manipulating the population through the promotion of festivals and events.

Nowadays, of course, the situation is quite different. Gold, for example, does not attract workers anymore, given the land’s state of exhaustion, and it does not represent the major activity in Ouro Preto. The religion followed the same path. Undoubtedly, it is still very important and characteristic of the city, but not like it used to be.

Nevertheless, some structures remained. The socio-cultural exchanges, for example, established in the past, have been perpetuated until today since Ouro Preto is an extremely touristic town and hosts an important university. It is notable, too, that the mining activity is still the most important one, but more elaborate than it used to be in the past.

Finally, it is important to understand that studying the past is much more than "looking back". Doing so means making connections between the time that passed and the present, remembering our socioeconomic traditions and inheritances and uniting them with the current reality.

Marcos Vinicius