Rustic bliss at Brazil’s Ibiti Project

At 7pm promptly, dressed in black tie, Lucas Soares Nogueira, a refuse collection manager, took his place next to the pool table at the keyboard of the grand piano. I settled into my seat, an audience of one. Nogueira paused, rubbed his hands briefly and launched himself upon Bach’s Prelude in G Minor. Dozing on the door mat, Peanut, the village dog, opened one eye with the air of a weary music critic, sighed and went back to sleep.

I was in a remote hamlet in the Brazilian interior, surrounded by miles of Atlantic rainforest interspersed with steep pastures of lowing cattle. It was a curious setting for a formal piano recital. But as the tumbling notes of the preamble rolled out through the open door to the dirt road, it occurred to me that perhaps Bach was rather appropriate here. Europeans first came into this country, some three hundred years ago, when Bach was trending. As they cut down the forests, built their houses of wood and mud, planted corn and beans, and set their cattle to graze, I imagine they were driving one another mad whistling the Prelude in G Minor.

But then time’s metronome slowed and almost stopped, stuck in the early 18th century, the age of Bach. For almost three hundred years, nothing much changed here. One of the guides I met described growing up in the area, on a smallholding two hours walk beyond the small town of São José dos Lopes. Their house had no electricity. It took half a day to bring their milk on the back of a donkey to sell to the dairy. People travelled by horse, or on foot. The world he talked about might have been any decade since the time of Bach. But it was the 1990s. “The modern world never really arrived,” he shrugged.

In our different ways, most of us are probably keen to save the planet, to rescue the place from ourselves. We worry about our carbon footprints, we sign petitions about the rainforest, we try to be careful about what goes in the recycling bin, but we struggle to know what else we can do beyond gluing ourselves to the M25.

In Brazil, Renato Machado decided to take direct action. An energetic and charismatic character, Machado lives in the state of Minas Gerais, where the rainforest is an actual thing, not just a slogan. With wealth accumulated from a successful contracting business, in the 1980s he began buying up land adjacent to the Ibitipoca State Park with the intention of protecting it.

I drove up from Rio to check it out, four hours north, to where the depleted Atlantic rainforest begins to overlap with the Cerrado, the dry savannah of the Brazilian interior. The last hour was into back country where the dirt road was so broken, so creviced by ruts and chasms, that I worried one of them might swallow the car. Hills tumbled away towards distant mountains. We rattled over copper-coloured rivers on plank bridges and passed abandoned lunch counters plastered with peeling advertisements for beer. We saw no one, save a family waiting on the roadside for the dilapidated bus that was rumoured to pass here once a day.

Towards day’s end we arrived at the village of Mogol. I stepped out of the car into a sudden silence. A miniature church, the walls pastel-coloured, was perched on a raised green. Straggling along the two roads on either side were a dozen or so low houses. Hummingbirds were feeding on the hyacinths round the path to the church. A solitary old man in a battered hat passed on a white horse. He paused and nodded. “O fim da estrada,” he said simply. End of the road.

Machado first came here 49 years ago, at the age of 13, with his father. His was a prosperous middle-class family from Juiz de Fora in Minas Gerais, just over 50 miles but three hundred years away from Mogol. A cousin owned some property here, and later, through his teens when he lived in Rio, Machado visited regularly with friends, bundled together in the back of old trucks, bouncing up the broken dirt roads, staying in old ranch houses, city boys escaping from the city, enjoying a holiday adventure in the back country. Like anywhere that we have known at an impressionable age, anywhere where we have been young and carefree, these wild idyllic hills burrowed into his heart.

It began as a personal passion. Machado bought old ranches that had become unprofitable from elderly owners who wanted to retire or from a younger generation keen to escape for a life in the city. Eventually he purchased some 250 properties, amassing some 16,000 acres. His dream was to reforest the landscape to create a greenbelt around Ibitipoca State Park and reintroduce species that had become extinct as their habitat had shrunk. He laughs now about the way, the moment he planted trees, the old ranches he had just bought dropped dramatically in value.

With time, Machado realised that his Ibiti reserve needed to be more than just an environmental project, that the regrowth of forests on its own was not enough. For this region to survive, for his plans for its protection to work, the reserve also needed to be a social and cultural project. It needed people: locals and visitors. And so he began to develop visitor facilities as the reserve became the Ibiti Project. With a team of sympathetic designers, they renovated the beautiful Engenho Lodge (a small hotel four miles to the east of Mogol), then a series of isolated ranch houses scattered across the hills nearby, and finally some of the empty houses of the village itself, which opened to guests in 2019. Visitors would provide an income stream for the project but more importantly they would provide employment for local people — well over 200 at last count — allowing their continued connection to this landscape, offering an alternative to cattle and logging.

There is now a school for the employees’ children, a vegetarian restaurant, nursery gardens, a line of organic produce from honey to coffee, a renewable energy scheme, a recycling project, yoga, lifestyle and wellness programmes. In conjunction with government agencies, they are working on various rewilding projects — notably tapir and the highly endangered muriqui monkey. There is horseback riding, bird watching, biking trails, an open-air cinema, and art pieces scattered around the hills. At Mogol, they invited indigenous builders to create a spectacular Amazonian longhouse of wood and grass thatch where they host conferences on regeneration, forestry, biodiversity, and much else.

For a conservationist, it is a kind of dream kingdom of rewilding, green development and low impact tourism. For the visitor, it is a sleepy hamlet of charming old houses, in a remote and beautiful corner of Brazil, where Bach’s preludes can be heard wafting on the still evening air.

The accommodation — five village houses in Mogol (one containing five suites that can be rented independently), three more isolated houses, and the eight-room Engenho Lodge — are among the chief delights. Carefully renovated and upgraded using recycled materials, antique elements, and repurposed fittings and furnishings, the houses retain their rustic vernacular aesthetic. Wood-fired iron stoves heat the morning coffee. Stained glass windows throw blocks of simple colour across wooden floorboards. Alfresco bathtubs overlook stunning views. Lines of simple floral decoration, painted by the resident artist, soften whitewashed walls. Hammocks and plain wooden benches furnish verandas and porches. The beautiful simplicity of these buildings is the luxury here, all part of Ibiti’s “less is more” approach. “It is not necessary to carve up half a mountain in Italy for marble,” Machado smiles, “in order to create a beautiful bathroom.”

Later this year Ibiti will launch its “travissia”, an itinerary of five or seven nights, with guests staying in all three types of accommodation, travelling between them (around 95 miles in total) by e-bike, or possibly on foot.

I loved waking in my house in Mogol. In the early mornings, there was the soft chatter of birds, bright seams of light around the edges of the closed shutters, the scent of wood shavings from the workshop next door, a sense of village seclusion. I showered in a bathroom flooded with light from a tall paned window overlooking forested slopes and the river below. Outside on the porch, Peanut was waiting for me. I had forgiven him his dismissive attitude to Bach.

Waving to Abraão, one of the original residents still living in the village, sweeping the steps of the church, and to the biologist loading vegetables into a cart for the tapirs, Peanut and I strolled up the empty red dirt street. In Yucca, the restaurant, a jolly cast of cooks in white aprons, all local women, were laying out my breakfast of eggs and warm bread with blackberry jam, fresh cakes and orange and passion fruit juice.

Every day brought a new adventure. One morning I set off to see the sunrise. After waking at 3.30am, I took coffee and muffins in the dark with my guide, then bundled into an old Land Rover, which wheezed as it clambered up an impossible track for an hour. From a remote lookout, I watched the world swim into view, the rays of the sun lighting the backs of dark hills like smooth-flanked whales riding in seas of cloud. Another day I spent the morning at Prainha do Engenho, a lake where macaws were quarrelling in the forests while I sunbathed in solitude on the decks. A third day I trekked to Palmerita waterfall, climbing down into the cathedral gloom of its deep canyon where the strangler figs were the size of man’s thigh. Sitting on a boulder behind the curtain of water, I felt like a stowaway.

Ibiti’s remote properties, some of them only accessed by mountain bike or 4×4, are quirky converted ranch houses, scattered in distant corners of the property up to 11 miles from Mogol, each with a gorgeous view and a sense of deep tranquillity as well as some “room service” supplies from the restaurant in Mogol. But after three days in Mogol, I was heading to Engenho Lodge, a sprawling property originally built in 1715 and overlooking a lake.

It has the feel of an old plantation house, a self-contained world with its library of books and maps, its stable of good horses, and its devoted staff, some of whose families have been in the area for generations. I prowled the long passageways barefoot, enjoying the feeling of the warm polished floors. Wide verandas embrace the house and are dotted with hammocks and deep divans. Vines curl around the balustrades and swallows flit in and out of the eaves. In a tree outside the dining room live a pair of blue and yellow macaws who peer through the windows at the strange humans within.

In the evenings, I took dinner in front of the fire in the drawing room, or out on the candlelit veranda as the surrounding landscapes fell away into velvety darkness. A chorus of frogs arose from the lake and errant fireflies winked beyond the railings until the moon rose. I wanted to stay forever.

Back in Mogol, Ibiti’s refuse collection manager was preparing for my private concert. The venue, formerly the village shop and now the Gaia Café, is a sprawling establishment that incorporates a cool coffee bar, a shop selling organic products, a lounge area with a pool table and old leather armchairs, and a veranda with an antique telescope. Downstairs is the spa and a perfect little cinema with popcorn and a library of DVD’s. Standing at the centre of the main room, on its carved legs, was a grand piano built by Steinway in New York in 1874 from Brazilian rosewood. Its journey back through Brazil over the past 150 years has involved a plantation owner in Pernambuco, a private home in Rio, and a piano restorer’s workshop in Petrópolis where Machado eventually discovered it and brought it to Mogol.

Nogueira played beautifully through a programme that ranged from Bach and Beethoven sonatas to Liszt’s wonderful “Liebestraum”. After each piece, he rose and bowed deeply as if an entire concert hall was applauding, rather than just me. It felt like make-believe, part of the wonderful dreamworld of the little hamlet of Mogol stranded at the end of a red dirt road.

It turns out that Machado’s intervention in Mogol and Ibitipoca is timely in this timeless place. The modern world may have been slow to arrive in this region, but it has turned up. In the last twenty years, the town of Ibitipoca, on the other side of the mountains, near the entrance to the park, has gone from sleepy village to a depressing chaos of cafés and guest houses, ATV and dirt bike operators, new holiday housing estates and cheap souvenir shops. It is a fate from which the village of Mogol and the lodge at Engenho and the whole Ibiti project, now four times the size of the park itself, has been rescued by the foresight of one man, remembering the delights of his youth.

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