Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Parques Nascentes e da Serra do Mar
You don't have to be a railway buff to appreciate Paranapiacaba. The village is set
amid one of the best preserved areas of Mata Atlântica in the country and most
visitors use it as a starting place for fairly serious hikes into the thickly forested
Parque Nascentes
and
Parque Estadual da Serra do Mar
, notable for their amazing
orchids and bromeliads. Employing a guide is strongly advised as trails are
unmarked, often very narrow and generally hard going, and venomous snakes
are common.
ARRIVAL AND INFORMATION
PARANAPIACABA
By train and bus
The easiest way to get to
Paranapiacaba is to take the CPTM (metropolitan
overground) line 10 from either Brás (on
metrô
line 3) or
Tamanduateí (on
metrô
line 2) down to Rio Grande
da Serra (about 1hr), and from there take local bus
#424 (hourly; 20min) to Largo da Igreja, directly above
Paranapiacaba town. Although line 10 is not strictly
speaking part of the
metrô
, the transport system is
integrated and your
metrô
ticket is valid on the CPTM.
Coming back, you can buy a single combined ticket on
the bus that covers the whole journey for R$4.25.
Alternatively, on any Sunday (except for the second
Sunday of the month), you can take a special Expresso
Turistico train all the way, departing from Luz station
at 8.30am and returning at 4.30pm (R$34 return;
T
0800
055
0121,
W
cptm.sp.gov.br/e_operacao
/exprtur/parana.asp).
Tourist information
The Centro de Informações
Turisticas (CIT) is on Largo das Padeiros at the bottom of
Rua Direita (9am-4.30pm; closed second Sunday of the
month;
T
11 4439 0239). The Parques Nascentes e da
Serra do Mar have a visitors' centre on Rua Direita
(a couple of doors up from the tourist office), where you
can engage a guide.
8
Campinas
Around 100km northwest of São Paulo,
CAMPINAS
has been in relative decline
compared to its neighbour since the nineteenth century, when it was by far the more
important of the two cities. It started life as a sugar-plantation centre, produced coffee
from 1870 and later made its money as a hub for agricultural processing. More
recently, Campinas has become something of a centre for high-tech industry and
education. An attractive city, with a reasonably compact centre, it doesn't have many
tourist sights as such, but it's certainly worth a wander, and its city centre, less glitzy
than São Paulo's, still hosts a lot of the small, independent shops that its bigger
neighbour sometimes seems so short of.
The heart of the downtown area is Praça Bento Quirino, with its impressive blue-and-
white fin-de-siècle
Jockey Club
. The other main square is Largo do Rosário, overlooked
by its 1883
Catedral
. About 13km from the city centre,
Unicamp
(the Universidade
Estadual de São Paulo), founded in 1969 on land belonging to Colonel Zeferino Vaz,
became - thanks to the protection afforded by Vaz - a refuge during the worst years of
military terror for left-wing teachers who would otherwise have been imprisoned or
forced into exile. Campinas has a student population of 100,000 and a reasonably
lively cultural life, centred on the
Centro de Convivência Cultural
, at Praça Imprensa
Fluminense.
Fazenda Monte d'Este
SP-340, Km 121 • Open by appointment • Tours (2hr) R$80 (plus R$200/group for an English-speaking guide) • Book on
T
19 3257 1236
If you have a car, one of the most interesting places to visit near Campinas is the
Fazenda Monte d'Este
, 12km from town, just off the SP-340 (the road leading to
Holambra). Built during the nineteenth-century coffee boom, the beautiful
fazenda
house is open to the public and contains a small museum outlining the development
of the area's former coffee-based economy.
