Word: diamantina
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There are places in Brazil, that troubled but rich giant, where just scuffing a shovel in the dirt might produce treasures to dream about. To prove it, communities like Diamantina, Turmalina, Esmeralda, Ametista dot the country. Last week the scene was Cristalina (pop. 3,800), an interior town some 60 miles south of Brasilia, once the center of a fabulous quartz-crystal boom and now devoted largely to agriculture and cattle raising...
...Burn. Then, in the early 19th century, the gold and diamond rush tailed off. Minas Gerais sank into backwoods somnolence. Not until the 20th century did the state come alive again. Even then the real surge had to wait until Juscelino Kubitschek, born in the old diamond center of Diamantina, moved into the governor's palace in 1951 in the new capital of Belo Horizonte. "Power and transportation," pledged Kubitschek, and that was only the beginning...
...name was not really Helena but Alice. She was Portuguese, living with her parents in the Brazilian diamond-mining town of Diamantina, and she began to keep her record of everyday happenings in 1893, when she was twelve. In 1942, as Senhora Augusto Mario Caldeira Brant of Rio de Janeiro (her husband twice served as president of the Bank of Brazil), she published her diary in a small edition for friends and family. Famed French Novelist Georges Bernanos saw it and proclaimed it a work of genius. By the time-1952-that U.S. Pulitzer-Prizewinning Poet Elizabeth Bishop went...
First Shoes. During the 18th century diamond rush in the inland plateau state of Minas Gerais, Diamantina was a rich, bustling city of 40,000 inhabitants. A local diamond magnate even had an artificial lake and several miniature ships built, so that his mulata mistress could ease her nostalgia for the sea without making the three-week muleback trip to Rio. By the time Juscelino Kubitschek was born, Sept. 12, 1901, the synthetic sea had long since vanished, along with the diamonds, and hillside Diamantina had shrunk into an uneventful, cobble-streeted town with a population of less than...
Even by the standards of Diamantina, the Kubitschek family was poor. When Júlia had taught her son all she could, she persuaded Diamantina's Roman Catholic seminary to take him as a pupil at a reduced tuition fee. On his first day of school, Juscelino, then eleven, put on his first pair of shoes, bought with money earned as a grocer's errand boy. Recalls one of his seminary teachers: "I never saw such a remarkable memory in a child. He could recite an entire page by heart after reading it once. He was not what...