Fourteen days in colonial Brazil: where the gold went, and who paid for it

The coach from Rio takes four hours along a coast road that spends most of its length between the mountains and the sea, and drops you at a small terminal five minutes' walk from the historic centre. Cars cannot get in, which you notice immediately.

Santa Rita is the oldest church in the town, finished in 1722, and it sits with its back to the water at the point where the streets meet the harbour. Lúcio Costa, the man who planned Brasília, called it the most beautiful church in Brazil, and whether or not that survives scrutiny it is a lovely small building with a triple bell gable and nothing else going on.

The main church, five minutes inland, took the better part of a century to build and stopped and started with the price of gold. Its square is the middle of the town and the best place to sit at six in the evening.

Walk out to the fort before dinner. It was thrown up in 1703 to keep French and British privateers off the gold shipments, rebuilt in 1822, and the walk to it climbs just enough to give you the bay, the town roofs and the mountains behind in one view.

The bay in front of Paraty holds dozens of islands and a great many small beaches, and the standard way to see them is a wooden schooner that leaves at eleven, anchors at three or four places, and gets back at five. Tickets are sold along the quay the evening before and the boats differ mainly in how loud the music is. Ask.

The best of the beaches on the mainland side, and the one worth insisting on, is Laranjeiras, reached by boat or by bus and then a footpath. The water is clear enough to see your feet in four metres of it.

Lula Beach, on the same run, is calmer and smaller and usually the quietest stop of the day.

Take cash for the caipirinhas the crew sell, and something long sleeved. Four hours on open water at this latitude burns people who thought they were being careful.

Behind Paraty the mountains rise into rainforest, and the old gold road climbs straight up through it. What sits along that road now is water and cachaça.

The Tobogã waterfall is a wide slab of smooth rock with a chute of water running down it, and local teenagers surf it standing up, which you should not attempt. There is a pool at the bottom, a bar on the bank and a path that carries on upstream through the trees. Go in the morning, before the buses.

Pedra Branca, closer to town, is a lower fall with a deeper pool and the ruins of the town's first power station beside it, slowly disappearing into the forest.

Then the drink. Paraty made cachaça for two centuries and the distilleries around it are small, old and serious about it, ageing spirit in local hardwoods rather than oak. The shops in town will pour you six or seven before you buy anything, and the good stuff is nothing like the supermarket bottle in a caipirinha.

This is the long day. Whichever way you do it, leave early: eight hours by road up the coast and inland, or the coach, plane and taxi version of the same journey. The road version climbs out of the coastal forest into open cattle country, and the last hour into Ouro Preto is a series of hills with a baroque church on top of each one.

Arrive, drop the bags and walk up to Praça Tiradentes, which is the flat top of the town and the point everything else falls away from. The School of Mines fills one side, the Inconfidência museum the other, and in the middle stands a statue of a man who was hanged, quartered, and had his head displayed on a post in this square in 1792 for plotting independence.

That is roughly the tone of Ouro Preto, and it is a good introduction to it. Eat early: this is a student town and a cold one, and the restaurants keep provincial hours.

Antônio Francisco Lisboa, known as Aleijadinho, was the son of a Portuguese architect and an enslaved African woman, and he is the great artist of colonial Brazil. From his thirties he suffered a degenerative disease that cost him the use of his fingers and eventually his toes, and he is said to have worked with tools strapped to his wrists. The church of São Francisco de Assis, begun in the 1760s, is his: he drew the plan, carved the soapstone medallion over the door, and the interior is rococo without a straight line in it. It is the single best building in Minas Gerais.

Nossa Senhora do Pilar, ten minutes downhill, is the opposite argument. Plain outside, and inside something close to half a tonne of gold leaf over carved wood, paid for by a parish that had it and wanted everyone to know. Go in expecting excess and it will still be more than you expected.

In the afternoon, the Inconfidência museum in the old town hall. In 1789 a group of local poets, priests, officers and mine owners plotted to declare Minas Gerais independent, inspired by the American revolution, and were betrayed before anything happened. The ringleaders were exiled to Africa and the one commoner among them, a militia officer nicknamed Tiradentes, was executed in Rio. The museum holds their papers, their sentences and their bones, and it is a serious piece of work.

Churches here shut for lunch and some open only in the morning. Do the two churches first and the museum after one.

Mariana was here before Ouro Preto, was the first capital of the captaincy and the seat of the bishop, and it has the flat streets that its neighbour does not. It is nine kilometres away and a fifteen minute bus ride, and on some days a steam train runs the branch line between the two towns, which is much the better way to arrive when it is operating. Check before you plan around it.

The cathedral, built between 1709 and 1750, is the biggest church of the region and holds a German organ of 1701 that was shipped out as a gift and still gets played at recitals a couple of times a week. Aleijadinho's father worked on the building and Manuel da Costa Ataíde, the painter whose ceilings are all over Minas, painted here.

The São Francisco church across the square is Ataíde's own: he is buried under the floor of it, at his request, and the medallion over the door is attributed to Aleijadinho. Between the two, the archdiocesan museum holds the best collection of sacred art in Brazil outside Salvador, in a building begun in 1770.

Three churches and a museum in a small square is the whole day, and Mariana is a calmer place to spend it than Ouro Preto.

Two hours down the mountain on a good road, and the change is abrupt: from a town of eighteenth century churches to a city of two and a half million with no old quarter at all, because it never had one. Belo Horizonte was drawn up from scratch and built in a few years flat, once the state gave up on Ouro Preto's hills.

Start at the Mercado Central, which opened in 1929 and has been the best argument for the city ever since. Four hundred odd stalls under one roof sell cheese from the state's farms, cachaça by the barrel, live birds, herbs for the terreiro, dried beef, sweets and every kind of pepper sauce. The bars inside serve the local sausage sandwich and cold beer from ten in the morning.

Then Praça da Liberdade, twenty minutes' walk south. It was the seat of state government for a century and when the offices moved out, the palaces around the square were turned into museums, which makes one lap of a palm avenue into a decent afternoon.

Belo Horizonte has more bars per head than any other Brazilian city, which is a statistic the city repeats about itself constantly and is broadly true. The Savassi district is where they are.

In 1940 the mayor of Belo Horizonte, a young man named Juscelino Kubitschek who would later build Brasília, gave the shore of an artificial lake to an architect in his early thirties whom nobody had heard of and told him to design a casino, a dance hall, a yacht club and a chapel. Oscar Niemeyer's work at Pampulha is where reinforced concrete stopped being rectangular in this country, and where the partnership that eventually produced a capital city was formed.

The little church of Saint Francis is the one to see. It is a series of parabolic vaults with a tiled Portinari mural of Saint Francis across the back wall, and the archdiocese was so offended by it that they refused to consecrate the building for sixteen years. It stood there, finished and unusable, until 1959.

The Mineirão stadium is ten minutes around the lake, and Brazilians will tell you what happened there on the eighth of July 2014 whether or not you ask. Tours run most days when there is no match.

Come back into town for the Museum of Arts and Crafts, in the old central railway station. It is a museum about work: the tools, benches and machines of the trades that existed in Brazil before industry, laid out with real care.

Confins airport is an hour north of Belo Horizonte and the flight to Salvador takes two, which puts you in Bahia in the middle of the afternoon and in the upper town by five.

The Pelourinho is a few blocks of steep, brightly painted colonial houses at the top of the cliff, and its name means pillory, because that is what stood in the triangular square at the bottom of it. Enslaved people were sold and whipped here. The district was left to rot for most of the twentieth century, then restored in the 1990s in a programme that displaced most of the families living in it, and the result is beautiful, uncomfortable and worth understanding before you walk into it.

Go into São Francisco while the light lasts. Every surface of the interior is carved cedar under gold leaf, the cloister outside is lined with Portuguese tiles, and the whole thing was built by enslaved and free black craftsmen in the early eighteenth century. It is the most extravagant church in Brazil and the story of how it got that way is the story of the city.

In the evening, drumming. Groups rehearse in the Pelourinho streets on Tuesday nights in particular, and it is free, loud and not staged for anybody.

Start with the museum that explains the rest of it. The Afro-Brazilian museum, in the old medical faculty on the square above the cathedral, sets out where the enslaved people brought to Bahia came from, what they brought with them, and how the orixás of Candomblé survived under the names of Catholic saints. The carved wooden panels of the orixás by Carybé, in the last room, are the single best thing in the building.

Then down. The Lacerda lift drops seventy metres from the upper town to the lower in about thirty seconds and costs almost nothing, and it has been carrying people up and down this cliff since 1873. At the bottom is the Mercado Modelo, a nineteenth century customs building full of craft stalls, and outside it, most afternoons, men fight capoeira in a ring of drums.

Finish at the far end of the peninsula. The lighthouse at Barra is the oldest in Brazil and stands on a fort at the mouth of All Saints Bay, with a small museum of shipwrecks inside it. The point faces west, which is why the entire city comes here to watch the sun go down into the bay.

Two nights means choosing. Bonfim church, up on its own hill in the north, is the other thing people come for, and it is a taxi ride rather than a walk.

An hour up the coast by air, and the first afternoon belongs to the old port island, which is small, flat and entirely walkable.

The Dutch held Recife from 1630 to 1654, and under them it was the only place in the Americas where Jews could worship openly. The Kahal Zur Israel synagogue on Rua do Bom Jesus, founded in 1636, is the oldest in the hemisphere: excavated in the 1990s, rebuilt around its original mikveh, and now a small museum. When the Portuguese retook the city the community scattered, and one group of twenty three sailed north to New Amsterdam and founded the Jewish community of what became New York.

The street outside is a row of restored eighteenth and nineteenth century houses painted in strong colours, and it is the best street in the city.

Walk to the point. Marco Zero is the square from which distances in Pernambuco are measured, and out on the reef offshore stands a park of ceramic towers by Francisco Brennand, reached by a small boat that shuttles across in five minutes. The Malakoff tower behind you is an 1850s naval observatory that still opens its dome on clear evenings.

Olinda is six kilometres north, on the only hill for miles, and it was the capital of the sugar captaincy until the Dutch burnt it in 1631 and moved the port down to Recife. What grew back is a small town of churches, walled gardens, mango trees and, since the 1970s, a large population of artists.

The cathedral sits at the top with the whole of Recife's skyline laid out below it across the water, which is the view every postcard of the city actually shows. It has been built, burnt and rebuilt more than once since the sixteenth century, and the interior is plainer than the position suggests.

The sacred art museum below it occupies the old city hall of 1535 and the bishop's palace of 1676, and holds religious pieces going back to the sixteenth century in rooms that are half the interest.

The rest of the day is the streets. Studios and workshops are open along Rua do Amparo, the giant carnival puppets are made and stored here, and the bars at the top of the hill sell cold beer and tapioca to people watching the light change over the water.

Santo Antônio, the middle island, is where colonial Recife did its business, and it holds the best interior in the city. The Franciscan convent dates from the end of the sixteenth century; the Capela Dourada inside it was added in the early eighteenth, and it is a small room in which every surface is carved wood covered in gold, lit from windows you cannot see. It takes about twenty minutes to look at properly and rather longer to stop looking.

Ten minutes south, the São Pedro church stands in a small square of colourful colonial houses that is one of the pleasantest corners of the city, and the church front is a piece of theatrical stonework quite unlike anything else here.

Behind it, the São José market has been trading since 1871 in an iron and glass frame that was shipped out from Europe, and it sells herbs, cordel pamphlets, leather hats, dried shrimp and religious statuary. It is smaller than the Belo Horizonte market and considerably more chaotic.

Leave the afternoon loose. Recife rewards being walked without a list, and the heat by two in the afternoon will make that decision for you anyway.

Recife's airport sits behind the beach, which makes the last morning easy: check out, take a car to Boa Viagem, and spend an hour under a rented umbrella with a coconut before you go.

One warning, and it is a real one. The reef here was dredged and the sharks that followed the shipping have made this one of the few genuinely dangerous urban beaches in the world. There are signs the length of it and the rule is simple: stay inside the natural reef pools at low tide, and do not swim out. Local people follow this and so should you.

Otherwise it is eight kilometres of white sand with a promenade behind it, vendors selling cheese grilled on a stick over coals, and the towers of the city standing directly on the beach.

The airport is fifteen minutes away and the domestic terminal is quick, which is a good end to a fortnight of long transfers.