Coffee, cachaça, and adventure: a route through Minas Gerais

12/13/2021

Tourists now have a chance to get to know Brazilian most precious treasures through a route filled with coffee, cachaça, adventure, and much more. In the heart of Minas Gerais, in Southeast Brazil, a group has been organizing a road trip combining family agriculture, tasting, sightseeing, and off-road tourism.

In a four-day itinerary, the participants get to know ten little cities and their rural zones, with many coffee farms, cachaça distilleries, and local restaurants. The tour includes tasting typical desserts, local cheese, and awarded coffee, locally known as “mountain coffee.”

The “Rota do Café & Cachaça” tour has already gathered 1,500 drivers and it is reaching for more. The project interconnects strategic areas of the Southeast Vertex, a region known as Pico da Bandeira that encompasses the states of Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, and Espírito Santo.

The tour guides were capacitated in the SENAR program and are specialized in artisanal production, cachaça, and cheese. “I encourage local producers to train themselves, to seek quality, and opportunities,” says Francisco Cabral, one of the organizers of the tour.

Itinerary

The route is divided into four itineraries with about 500 km each of dirt roads, beautiful landscapes, and gastronomic attractions of this entire region. Totaling 2,000 km (1,242.7 miles), the route highlights the production of the most genuine Brazilian goods: cachaça and coffee.

Besides these, the tourists also try other sugar cane-related products, as well as typical cheese and pork-related ones. The idea is to empower local producers with sustainable tourism. For this reason, the Ministry of Tourism awarded the tour with the National Tourism Award 2019, in the category “Use of Cultural Heritage for Tourism and Development.”

Read more:

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