Parque Estadual da Cantareira
Protected slice of Atlantic Forest on the mountain that once fed the city's first piped water system.
This guide to Parque Estadual da Cantareira in São Paulo opens in 1878, when Emperor Dom Pedro II knelt on a muddy hillside to set a stone blessing a private company's plan to drill into the mountain's springs and end the city's water shortage. It traces the English engineer who surveyed the mountain fifteen years earlier, the mule drivers whose clay water jars gave the mountain its name, and Colonel Antonio Proost Rodovalho, who took the water contract in 1875 and finally got pipes running to sixty thousand paulistanos by 1881. Listen for how a company built on a public promise carried itself once that promise looked secure.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.