Any tourism attraction worth its salt is shrouded by legend. In Egypt, the Sphinx mystery includes buzz about a visit from an Incan delegation. The horse-drawn hearse in front of Disneyland's Haunted Mansion is falsely believed to be the actual carriage used to carry the body of Mormon patriarch Brigham Young to his grave in 1877. Rio de Janeiro’s Gávea Rock is the purported burial place of a Phoenician king.
So be it with Brazil’s Curitiba-Paranaguá Railway. Allow me to start by dispelling a legendary rumor: chief engineer João Teixeira Soares did not take his own life on February 1, 1885, on the eve of the line’s inauguration by his royal highness Dom Pedro II. There is no evidence that Teixeira Soares feared that the ridge-running rail would prove unworthy. He did not expect a locomotive to suddenly go hurtling off a precipice. For the record, Teixeira Soares died on August 27, 1927, presumably without remorse, at the age of 79, during a visit to Paris.
Not that the tale of fear, loathing and suicide doesn’t ring true. The railway wends its way through some of the most rugged, and striking, territory Brazil has to offer – a coastal mountain range covered by dense tropical rainforest. The plan was originally conceived by the Rebouças brothers, Antônio and André, sons of a Portuguese father and a freed black slave. (André was a leader in the Brazilian abolitionist movement; Brazilian slaves won emancipation in 1888.) European engineers pronounced a unanimous verdict on their idea: an impossible folly.
Accidents are not particularly common on this railway, but the Teixeira Soares story seemed especially germane after a freight train derailed a few weeks before my visit, spilling forth its contents. The smell of the fermenting load of soybeans reached me well before I managed to spot the mangled boxcars strewn along either side of the tracks. However foul to the olfactory sense, the rotting soybeans reminded me that the single track still serves its original purpose – to get crops from the interior to port. Today Paranaguá handles one-quarter of Brazilian agricultural exports. What’s more, it is the epicenter of a Byzantine conflict involving multinational grain exporters and populist Governor Roberto Requião who, among other things, opposes a proposal to privatize the port. “They won’t do it with my participation,” he recently told me and a group of fellow foreign reporters.
So Teixeira Soares did not take his own life after all, but death did loom as a constant theme during the railway’s construction. An estimated 5,000 men – mostly Italians, Germans and Poles - died during the five years it took to complete the 70-mile stretch of rail from the coast to the Paraná state capital.
Most succumbed to regular maladies like snakebites, typhoid and malaria, or to conventional construction injuries, but on occasion workers faced somewhat more novel vocational hazards - such as when they began work on the São João Bridge. An impressive iron structure, the bridge was imported in sections from Belgium and covers a span of 370 feet. Workers had no cables to help them make the 180-foot descent to the riverbed below to set the bridge’s foundation, tells historian Rubens R. Habitzreuter. So they fashioned a makeshift contraption out of vines and bamboo. That was the easy part. The hard part, they found, was remaining calm when they came face-to-face with the jaguar that had gone to the riverside for a drink.
Plentiful over a century ago, the now endangered jaguar enjoys in the Serra do Mar a rare chunk of preserved natural habitat. Other endangered species that inhabit the region include the giant anteater and birds like the black hawk-eagle and the black-fronted piping-guan.
I didn’t see any of those animals from my window seat, but I was treated to the spectacular sight of the Marumbi mountain range, as wisps of clouds seemed to try to scale them. I also saw sundry examples of the flat-topped Paraná pine, or candelabra tree, the Paraná state symbol, with its tall, straight trunk and horizontal branches. This pine is a gendered tree, with male and female counterparts. Only the female produces the seeds that were once a staple of the diet of the original natives and remain a mainstay of regional recipes. Boiled, the bite-sized seeds are much appreciated as snacks. Locals are particularly adept at using their teeth to coax the meat from the shell without undo clawing and scraping.
At kilometer 65, looking down the embankment, just below the rail, I spied a lonesome cross. Such adornments are common along Brazilian roadsides, erected by relatives to mark the spot where a loved one met his or her death in a traffic accident. This particular cross reveals the spot where a political prisoner was assassinated.
The story begins with the declaration of the Brazilian republic in 1889. Following the dissolution of Congress and sundry other shenanigans by federal officials in Rio de Janeiro, anti-republican rebels took up arms in southern Brazil. As the story goes, wealthy businessman Baron Serro Azul helped pay off the rebels to dissuade them from razing his hometown, Curitiba, as they advanced northward. For his troubles, he earned a spot on a presidential enemies list. In 1894, he was arrested, taken to the middle of nowhere, kilometer 65, pushed off the train, and summarily shot. Maurício Appel first encountered the cross at the age of seven while traveling on the railway with his mother. Decades later he produced a feature film about the episode called “The Price of Peace.”
Unlike the ill-fated Baron, I managed to safely reach the end of my journey. The tourist-oriented Serra Verde Express leaves Curitiba early in the morning and takes about three hours to make the one-way trip to the coast, allowing time for a leisurely lunch in either the historic town of Morretes or the at the end of the line in Paranaguá. You can make a return trip in the afternoon.
Brazil Travel: Serra Verde Express
Serra Verde Express
Madalozo Restaurante for the traditional “barreado” dish in Morretes.
Information about visits to the Paranaguá Port (in Portuguese).
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