Explore the real-world places that appear in The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by Guimarães Rosa. Each location on the map shows what happens there in the novel, the real history of the place, and what's there today. Featured locations include São Francisco River, Cordisburgo, Serra do Cabral, Chapada Gaúcha, Parque Nacional Grande Sertão: Veredas and 7 more.
Rio São Francisco — The great river crossed throughout Riobaldo's journey
The São Francisco River, known as the 'Velho Chico,' flows through Riobaldo's entire existence as a jagunço. It is on the banks of and crossings of this river that Riobaldo first encounters the mysterious Reinaldo (later revealed as Diadorim) as a young boy, a meeting that defines his life. The river serves as a threshold between worlds — civilization and the wild sertão — and its crossing becomes a recurring image of fate and irreversibility in Riobaldo's monologue.
The São Francisco River is Brazil's third longest river and one of the country's most historically significant waterways. It was central to the colonization of the Brazilian interior, serving as a route for cattle drovers, bandits, and missionaries from the 17th century onward. The river gave rise to the culture of the sertão that Guimarães Rosa immortalized.
The São Francisco River remains a vital waterway in Brazil, running through five states. It is a site of ongoing environmental concern due to diversion projects and drought, and it remains a symbol of northeastern Brazilian identity and culture.
Visit: Rio São Francisco (landmark)
Guimarães Rosa's birthplace in the heart of Minas Gerais
Though Cordisburgo does not appear by name as a setting in the novel, it is the biographical heartland from which Riobaldo's entire world is drawn. Guimarães Rosa grew up here among the storytelling traditions, linguistic innovations, and moral landscapes of the Minas sertão that he transplanted directly into the novel. The town's oral culture and its relationship to the cerrado and its jagunço mythology are the raw material of Riobaldo's long confession.
Cordisburgo was founded in the 19th century and is located in the karst limestone region of central Minas Gerais, close to the famous Lapinha Cave. Guimarães Rosa was born here on June 27, 1908, and spent his early childhood absorbing its rural culture before moving to Belo Horizonte.
Cordisburgo is home to the Casa Museu Guimarães Rosa, a museum dedicated to the author's life and work. The town celebrates its connection to the writer with a literary festival and draws visitors interested in the origins of his literary universe.
Visit: Casa Museu Guimarães Rosa (museum)
Mountain range in northern Minas Gerais — terrain of the jagunço bands
The rugged highland terrain of the Serra do Cabral and its surrounding chapada is the kind of landscape through which Riobaldo and his jagunço band ride throughout the novel. The scrub-covered hills and difficult passes are where ambushes are laid and where the bands of Joca Ramiro, Hermógenes, and Medeiro Vaz maneuver against each other. This geography of harsh beauty shapes the fatalistic worldview that pervades Riobaldo's narration.
The Serra do Cabral is a quartzite mountain range in the northern Minas Gerais cerrado, historically used as a refuge by quilombolas and bandits due to its difficult terrain. The region's sparse population and harsh conditions made it a frontier zone through the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Serra do Cabral today is partly protected as an environmental area. The region is known for its rupestrian grasslands and endemic flora. Some areas are accessible to ecotourists.
Visit: Serra do Cabral (park)
Far northwestern Minas Gerais — deep sertão territory
The dry, remote chapada landscape of the far northwestern Minas Gerais border region matches the deep sertão through which Riobaldo and the jagunços travel in the novel's central passages. Here, in landscapes of sparse vegetation, extreme heat, and vast distances, Riobaldo undergoes his existential crisis about God, the devil, and free will. The emptiness of the landscape mirrors the emptiness and doubt within Riobaldo himself.
This region remained one of the most isolated and underdeveloped parts of Minas Gerais well into the 20th century. It was known as a zone of cattle ranching, subsistence farming, and banditry — exactly the world Guimarães Rosa depicts.
Chapada Gaúcha is now a small municipality and is the gateway to the Grande Sertão: Veredas National Park, Brazil's largest cerrado national park, whose very name derives from Guimarães Rosa's novel.
Visit: Parque Nacional Grande Sertão: Veredas (park)
Minas Gerais/Bahia border — named after the novel itself
The veredas — the palm-lined gallery forests along stream courses cutting through the cerrado — are among the most recurring and beautiful images in the novel. Riobaldo describes riding through veredas as moments of uncanny peace amid violence, the tall buriti palms marking water and life in an otherwise parched landscape. The word 'veredas' in the novel's Portuguese title ('Grande Sertão: Veredas') signals this geography as the novel's emotional and spiritual core.
This national park was established in 1989 and encompasses nearly 232,000 hectares on the Minas Gerais and Bahia border. Its ecosystems — cerrado, veredas, and buritizais — are precisely those described by Guimarães Rosa, who traveled this region as a physician and later as a government agricultural inspector in the 1930s.
The park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site (as part of the Cerrado Protected Areas) and is one of Brazil's most important conservation areas. Its name directly honors the novel, and it is accessible from Chapada Gaúcha and Formoso.
Visit: Parque Nacional Grande Sertão: Veredas (park)
Major São Francisco river town — regional center of the sertão
Januária represents the type of small river city on the São Francisco that functions as an outpost of civilization in Riobaldo's world — places where jagunços resupply, where information travels, and where the authority of the state is nominally present but largely irrelevant. Riobaldo's narration references the towns along the river as points of orientation in a landscape that otherwise defies order, and Januária was one of the most important such towns in this exact region.
Januária was one of the most important towns in northern Minas Gerais from the 18th century onward, serving as a major hub for São Francisco River navigation and the cattle trade. Its location made it a crossroads for commerce, religion, and banditry in the sertão.
Januária is a mid-sized city with approximately 67,000 inhabitants. It retains significant colonial architecture and is an important cultural and commercial center for the northern Minas Gerais region. Its port area still recalls the era of river navigation.
Visit: Januária Historic Center (historic site)
Rio Urucuia — tributary of the São Francisco and key sertão geography
The Urucuia River and its valley are directly referenced in the novel as part of the geographic world through which Riobaldo moves. Guimarães Rosa knew this terrain intimately from his travels, and the Urucuia's banks — with their buriti palm veredas and cattle-grazing land — feature in Riobaldo's descriptions of riding through the sertão. The river marks the contested boundary zone where jagunço bands operate with impunity.
The Urucuia River has been a vital resource for the northwestern Minas Gerais sertão since colonial times. The valleys along its banks were settled by cattle ranchers and small farmers who formed the social substrate of the jagunço world Guimarães Rosa depicts.
The Urucuia River valley is now part of one of Brazil's most important agricultural frontiers, where soybean farming has dramatically altered the cerrado landscape. Conservation efforts to protect the remaining veredas and cerrado are ongoing.
Colonial mining town in western Minas Gerais — edge of the sertão world
Paracatu represents the type of established colonial town — with church, commerce, and a semblance of law — that sits at the boundary of the civilized world and the lawless sertão in Guimarães Rosa's novel. Towns like Paracatu are where Riobaldo's narration locates the fazendeiros and political bosses whose rivalries set the jagunço bands against each other. The contrast between such towns and the open sertão is central to the novel's meditation on civilization and barbarism.
Paracatu was founded in the 18th century as a gold and diamond mining settlement and became one of the most important towns in western Minas Gerais. It retains significant baroque colonial architecture and was a major node in the trade routes crossing into Goiás and Bahia.
Paracatu is a city of approximately 91,000 people and is classified as an official Brazilian Historical Heritage site. Its 18th-century churches and urban fabric are well-preserved and open to visitors.
Visit: Paracatu Historic Center (historic site)
São Francisco River crossing town — gateway to the sertão
Pirapora sits at the point where the São Francisco River becomes navigable and where the sertão truly begins. In the world of the novel, river crossings like this one are charged with significance — they represent moments of commitment, of no return, of passing into the lawless interior. Riobaldo's transformations throughout the novel are marked by such crossings, and Pirapora's position as the last major settlement before the deep sertão gives it symbolic weight in the geography Guimarães Rosa constructed.
Pirapora became the terminus of the Central do Brasil railway in the early 20th century, making it the point where goods and people transferred from rail to river transport. The town was a major hub for the gaiolas — the iconic stern-wheel riverboats that plied the São Francisco.
Pirapora is home to the Museu do Sertão and is famous for its Festival de Boi de Piranha. The railway bridge and São Francisco riverfront remain major landmarks, and the city celebrates its river heritage annually.
Visit: Pirapora São Francisco Waterfront (landmark)
Largest city of northern Minas Gerais — regional capital of the sertão
Montes Claros represents the nearest approach to urban authority in the sertão world of the novel. The political and economic power of the fazendeiros and coronéis who set the jagunço bands in motion radiates from regional centers like this one. Riobaldo's reflections on power, justice, and corruption implicitly invoke the reality that such cities represent the state and law while remaining complicit in the violence of the backlands.
Montes Claros grew from an 18th-century cattle-ranching settlement to become the dominant city of northern Minas Gerais by the 20th century. Its growth was tied to the cattle economy and later to rail connections, making it the commercial capital of the sertão region Guimarães Rosa documented.
Montes Claros is a city of approximately 420,000 people and is a major university, commercial, and health center for northern Minas Gerais. It hosts cultural institutions and is a base for travelers exploring the sertão and the Grande Sertão: Veredas region.
Visit: Montes Claros Cultural Center (landmark)
Gateway town to Grande Sertão: Veredas National Park
The remote municipality of Formoso sits at the heart of the landscape Guimarães Rosa traversed and transmuted into fiction. This is the country of the veredas — the buriti-lined watercourses — that give the novel's Portuguese title its second word. The land around Formoso is where Riobaldo's imaginary but geographically precise journeys across the sertão unfold, and where the reader can most closely encounter the actual landscape of the novel.
Formoso is a small municipality that was only formally created in the late 20th century, though its territory has been settled by cattle ranchers and subsistence farmers since the 18th century. Guimarães Rosa is known to have traveled through this region during his 1930s expeditions through the sertão.
Formoso serves as the primary access point for the Grande Sertão: Veredas National Park. The town has basic tourism infrastructure and is a destination for ecotourists and literary pilgrims tracing the geography of Guimarães Rosa's novel.
Visit: Parque Nacional Grande Sertão: Veredas (Formoso entrance) (park)
São Francisco River reservoir — boundary of sertão and civilization
Though the Três Marias dam was built after the novel's composition, the stretch of the upper São Francisco it now covers was part of the landscape Guimarães Rosa knew from his travels and which informs Riobaldo's sense of the river as a presence larger than any individual life. The upper São Francisco's transition from accessible river to mythic waterway mirrors the novel's own movement between the mundane and the cosmic, between a man's life story and questions about the soul.
The Três Marias Dam was constructed between 1957 and 1962, creating one of Brazil's largest reservoirs. The area it flooded was part of the traditional sertão landscape of central Minas Gerais, and its construction was contemporary with the novel's publication in 1956.
The Três Marias Reservoir is a major tourist destination for water sports, fishing, and ecological tourism. The surrounding area has facilities for visitors and is an important regional landmark on the São Francisco River.
Visit: Represa de Três Marias (landmark)
More by Guimarães Rosa: All Guimarães Rosa books