The hotel rooms are in the building in the foreground.
Caraça is a former monastery and boarding school, now run by the Catholic church as a pousada (hotel) and park (Parque Natural do Caraça). Apparently there has been a monastery on the site since 1774, but the current buildings were completed in 1883. They like to mention that the boarding school educated some past presidents of Brazil. The Maned Wolf is an unforgettable highlight of any visit here.
The park is 11,233 hectares (about 43 square miles) and apparently there is an effort to make it into a national park. The main habitats are rain forest and cerrado (a savannah-like habitat).
The hotel rooms are in the building in the foreground.
These are the steps that the wolves come up, to the patio in front of the church.
(They get their own page)
Looking back the other way from below the steps
Formal garden, looking down from the patio
Services are still held in the church
The shell of this building is a ruin, but if you look carefully you can see that nestled inside the shell is a modern steel and glass building, which is a museum and library. At the time, I thought maybe this was the ruin of the 18th century monastery, but I've since found that it was the school, which was destroyed by fire in 1968. Apparently it was that fire that caused them to discontinue the school and become a hotel.
Another view of the museum inside the ruin. The ruin is open on this end.
A waterfall in the park
At breakfast, you cook your own eggs over a wood stove.
Breakfast was a big all-you-can-eat buffet, only the eggs were do-it-yourself. The sign says “Por gentileza sirva somente o que vai consumir no refeitório.” (you know what Google translate is for...)
We thought some of the eggs might be Guan eggs but we're not sure. These are the only bilingual signs that we saw anywhere on the trip. Everyplace we stayed had WiFi (making me regret not bringing my laptop) and I made some good use of Google Translate on my Droid phone.
Lunch and dinner were also buffets, kept warm over a wood stove. Later we noticed wood stoves just like these in some roadside restaurants.
