Gouveia

Gouveia grew along the routes between the mining settlements of Tijuco and Serro Frio in Minas Gerais. Travellers needed a stopping place, and Maria de Gouveia, a Portuguese landowner, kept a lodging house at Arraial Velho. Prospectors seeking new workings and families cultivating the land helped form the settlement within the wider diamond-mining country.

Local tradition explains its relocation through an image of Saint Anthony. Maria supposedly ordered an enslaved servant to carry the image to her estate by night, then spread the story that the saint had chosen to move. A chapel and a new settlement followed, called Santo Antônio de Gouveia. Beyond this foundation story, the municipal history records a church already standing by 1740 and permission for a baptismal font and the Blessed Sacrament in 1765. Mining routes, an estate household and the developing chapel gave the eighteenth-century settlement its distinctive beginnings.