Mariana: Museums, Literature and Landscape

Mariana brings together cultural history, a literary biography and landscapes, offering different ways to consider the destination according to your interests. Two museums offer distinct perspectives: the Museu de Mariana explores the city’s distinctive features, while the Museu Casa Alphonsus de Guimaraens focuses on a poet and his former home. Itacolomi State Park adds protected landscapes and hiking trails to this cultural perspective; it stretches between Mariana and Ouro Preto. You can therefore consider city history, literature and landscape separately or together when choosing your destination.

Museums: City History and Literature

The Museu de Mariana is a place for presenting, interpreting and conveying the city’s cultural, social, historical, geographical, geological, and political-religious characteristics. This mission brings together different perspectives rather than narrowing Mariana down to a single topic. The museum is located in the Casa do Conde de Assumar, which formerly housed the city’s first bishop’s palace. The museum today and the building’s former function as a bishop’s palace represent two different historical layers of the house. Exhibition content may change.

The Museu Casa Alphonsus de Guimaraens opened in 1987 in the house where the poet lived with his family, wife and children from 1913 to 1921. The permanent exhibition “Alphonsus de Guimaraens, Poeta do Luar” opened in June 2018. The period he lived in the house, the museum’s opening and the exhibition’s opening thus mark different milestones: the poet’s life in the house, the museum’s opening and the start of the permanent exhibition. The collection includes the writer’s personal belongings, personal photographs, his private library and written documents, as well as items from his work as a judge. The literary connection is thus linked to personal, written and professional aspects of the poet’s life.

The two houses are clearly distinct in terms of the interests they address: the Museu de Mariana covers the city’s characteristics across a broad range of topics, while the Alphonsus house connects literature with a particular poet, his former home and a collection. They offer, side by side, a city-wide perspective drawing on several disciplines and a biographical approach.

Landscape Between Mariana and Ouro Preto

Itacolomi State Park offers a distinct focus on landscape. It extends over 5,971 hectares between Ouro Preto and Mariana, protects remnants of Atlantic Forest and high-altitude grasslands, and has well-maintained hiking trails marked in Portuguese. The area figure gives a sense of the protected area’s scale; the forest remnants and high-altitude grasslands identify the types of landscape it protects. The hiking trails add a specific activity to this perspective. This sets the park apart from the museums: the focus here is on landscape conservation and hiking. Together, the cultural and landscape themes offer different ways to decide whether Mariana suits your travel interests.

Discover more destinations: Barbacena, Estrela Dalva, Montezuma, Belo Horizonte, Timóteo, Guarda-Mor, Saudade, Caeté

For the overview of the wider region: Minas Gerais.