Itamarandiba

The settlement later called Itamarandiba was known as São João Batista in the interior of Minas Gerais. Its municipal history places the growth of the village around a first chapel built in 1765. The chapel gives a firmer eighteenth-century landmark than the several competing accounts of how the settlement began.

Local tradition connects its origins both with explorers seeking precious minerals and with people moving from Vila do Fanado, now Minas Novas, in search of fertile land. Another version associates the area with Fernão Dias Paes Leme's expedition of 1675–1680. These are alternative foundation narratives, rather than proof of one securely dated founding event. The municipality's own account also acknowledges Indigenous inhabitants before the newcomers. For the period before 1837, São João Batista can thus be described as an emerging chapel settlement in a previously inhabited interior; its later district and municipal institutions had yet to be created.