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A Visitor's Guide to the Chapada Diamantina Mountains (2004)
The popularity of the Chapada Diamantina has been growing greatly in recent years. A bit off the beaten track, these high mountains are a change from the beaches and sea front resorts that attract so many foreign visitors to Brazil. The towns are small here, and visitor-friendly, the scenery is just fantastic - with lots of waterfalls, rivers, swimming holes, mountain tops to climb, caves to visit, trails to hike, and local cooking to be enjoyed. The Chapada Diamantina has something for everyone. Lots of people come out to spend a day or two and end up staying a week, some have even moved in…It's different and unexpected and it has a charm that you can only experience in the interior of Brazil.
This book is addressed to the English-speaking visitor who would like to know more about the area - not just what scenic spots to visit, but also more about their geology, history, botany, and wild-life, as well as the culture and customs of the local residents.
As Leias Municipais do Meio Ambiente - Lençóis, Bahia (2006)
O Município de Lençóis foi pioneiro na criação de Parques Municipais (1986 e 1996) na Chapada Diamantina e na promulgação de leis que protegem o meio ambiente – especialmente seus recursos hídricos.
O cumprimento da lei depende, no entanto, não só da sua promulgação e da vontade e capacidade das autoridades locais de efetivá-la, mas, em grande parte, do conhecimento por parte do cidadão e de seu conteúdo e importância.
Assim, a Fundação Chapada Diamantina preparou este livrinho com as principais leis municipais que tratam do meio ambiente na expectativa de promover seu conhecimento ao público geral e, talvez, estimular as pessoas nos outros municípios vizinhos a criar dispositivos legais semelhantes (e melhores!), dando mais munição para aqueles que querem entrar na luta por uma vida melhor, no presente e no futuro, na Chapada Diamantina.
“Environmental Laws of the Municipality of Lençóis ” (2006)
This book is a collection of all the laws, municipal decrees, and judicial decisions related to environmental issues in the municipality of Lençóis , Bahia State, Brazil.
The town of Lençóis was founded in 1844 (just a few years before the California gold rush) as a diamond-rush town. Bust, as it always does, followed soon on the heals of a spectacular boom in diamond mining, and the region has spent all but about 20 years of its 160+ year history just a few steps ahead of total poverty. All of the regional natural resources have traditionally been exploited in their most primary form through mining, hunting, wood cutting, grazing on native pasture land (with the continual use of fire to maintain the vegetation low and open), rock cutting, etc.
The creation of the Chapada Diamantina National Park in 1985 kind of caught everyone off-guard, but it started a cultural revolution that continues to change the way people see and treat the lands around them. Most of the old miners continued their work in the mountains, but their children soon became guides and/or picked up work in the thousands of service jobs generated by a healthy tourist industry. It didn't take long for the preservationist mindset to spread throughout the younger generation (after all, they were earning good money as guides and getting a lot of attention for their fire-fighting efforts), and we can count on popular support for conservation actions.
As an aside, but an important one, is that tourism grew very slowly in the Chapada Diamantina, without anyone really noticing for many years. In that quiet time the locals built an extra room to put up a visitor, a little hotel ( pousada ), a restaurant, tourist shop, travel agency, or fixed up their car to ferry tourists around. By the time Lençóis and the region began to really attract attention, almost all the jobs and physical space was occupied by locals and the big tourist industry money never got a foot in the door. As a result all the stake holders are direct participants in the economic benefits derived from tourism, and everyone is well aware that dollars are green and trees are green and that there is a direct and firm relationship between the two phenomena.
Getting back to the book of environmental laws….. over the years we've been able to cobble together a series of pretty good rules and regulations concerning the use of the land and the water and the tourist areas. Problem was that few people knew about them, and if you don't know about a law you can't see that it is enforced. So, the Chapada Diamantina Foundation has just published a compendium of these regulations and is distributing them free to the schools, business leaders, governmental agencies, and interested citizens. It quite a potpourri of regulations, creating municipal parks, protecting landmark trees, insuring water quality, declaring old trails as public right-of-ways, keeping glass bottles and hard liquor out of the tourist areas, noise regulation, and more.
Useful Plants of the Chapada Diamantina
This book is directed towards the general public and employs an informal and accessible writing style as well as colored photographs of all the plants described. It is designed to familiarize visitors with the native plants that have come to be used in many diverse forms by the local population (in medicine, construction work, as food, in religious ceremonies, or as insect repellents, glue, etc., etc.)
Plantas Úteis da Chapada Diamantina (2004)
Plantas Úteis da Chapada Diamantina ” é um dos produtos do Projeto Diversidade Florística e Distribuição das Plantas da Chapada diamantina (PCD), realizado no período de 1994 a 1996, com base num programa de colaboração entre o Royal Botanic Gardens (RBG-Kew) e instituições brasileiras, UFBA, USP, IBGE, CEPEC, UEFS e FCD. Sob a coordenação de UEFS e da FCD, este livro é dirigido aos estudantes, professores, pessoas da comunidade e turistas que visitam a Chapada.
Grande parte das informações encontradas no livro foi resgatada da experiência dos autores como moradores e pesquisadores da flora da região desde a década de 1970. Resalta-se que as plantas citadas neste livro não foram testadas farmacologicamente, não sendo portanto recomendado seu uso.
Como este livro é dirigido ao público geral, buscamos descrever as espécies numa linguagem acessível e informal, incluindo caracteres que facilitem o reconhecimento da espécie, o objetivo de sua utilização e onde é encontrada na natureza, seguida de fotografias coloridas (em parte feitas pelo fotografo Calil Neto).
Um Guia ao Visitante a Chapada Diamantina (2002)
Depois de décadas de esquecimento, a Chapada Diamantina está voltando ao cenário nacional.
Antes do início deste século o esgotamento efetivo das jazidas de diamantes tornou o garimpo uma atividade secundária e o povo da Chapada voltou as suas ocupações rurais tradicionais, enquanto a atenção do Estado se voltava mais ao litoral.
Na década de 80, este quadro começou a mudar através de investimentos em turismo no interior do estado.
O descobrimento de jazidas inesperadas de prazer nos rios cristalinos da região, nos passeios na serra, na vegetação nativa e no contato com a natureza nas montanhas provocou uma nova "corrida" para a Chapada Diamantina.
Agora, visitantes de todo Brasil (e do mundo) estão explorando a serra em busca desta riqueza rara e efêmera.
Este livro pretende ajudar o visitante na sua busca das riquezas naturais da serra. É um simples "mapa da mina" para quem quer saber mais sobre a região - sua geologia, ecologia, história natural, suas plantas e ecossistemas, e a historia do diamante, do garimpo e dos coronéis.
Diferentemente do diamante, o prazer do contato com a natureza é essencialmente inesgotável; há grandes quantidades para todos compartilharem com suas famílias e amigos.
Esperamos que sua visita a Chapada Diamantina seja agradável e enriquecedora.
Fique ciente, porém, que esta riqueza só vai durar se cuidarmos da serra.