The indigenous route that connects the Atlantic to the Pacific – 04/14/2023 – Tourism

Guavas and carambola ripe on the ground are stuck to the soles of my boots, forming a sweet mass in fermentation while I walk through the peaceful town of Peabiru, with its 13 thousand inhabitants, 500 km from Curitiba.

I had traveled to the state of Paraná, not far from the border with Paraguay, in search of the remnants of the Caminho de Peabiru —a 4,000-kilometer network of trails linking the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, built along millennia by South American indigenous peoples.

The Peabiru Path was a spiritual route for the Guarani people in search of a mythological paradise. And it also became the path towards the treasures of the continent when European colonists arrived in search of access to the interior of South America.

But most of the original path has disappeared, consumed by nature or turned into highways over the centuries. Only in recent years has this fascinating route begun to reveal its mysteries to the public, thanks to the development of new tourist tours.

It’s easy to understand why this transcontinental trail so easily captures people’s imaginations—a fascination that goes back to the first European known to walk its entire length: Portuguese navigator Aleixo Garcia.

Garcia was shipwrecked off the coast of Santa Catarina in 1516, after the failure of a Spanish mission that intended to navigate the Rio de la Plata. He and half a dozen other navigators were welcomed by the receptive Guarani natives.

Eight years later, after hearing stories about a path that led to a mountain empire rich in gold and silver, Garcia traveled with 2,000 Guarani warriors to the Andes, some 3,000 kilometers away.

Brazilian researcher Rosana Bond, in the book “A Saga de Aleixo Garcia: o Descobridor do Império Inca”, states that Garcia was the first known European to visit the Inca empire in 1524 —about a decade before the arrival of the Spanish conqueror Francisco Pizarro , widely known as the “discoverer” of the native people of the Peruvian Andes.

The trails coming from Brazil connected to the network of Inca and pre-Inca roads through the Andes, which today receive many visitors, but the Peabiru Path itself has left little trace.

This lack of physical evidence has not only led to differing theories in academic circles about who created it and when, but also sparked widespread speculation about its possible creation by the Vikings or the Sumerians—or even by the Apostle Thomas, supposedly coming from an evangelizing mission to India. .

Some theories claim the trail dates back to around 400 or 500 AD, while others suggest it goes back as far as 10,000 years to paleoindigenous hunter-gatherers.

“The Peabiru Way was the most important transcontinental road in pre-Columbian America, which connected peoples, territories and oceans”, says archaeologist Cláudia Inês Parellada, who has published several studies on the subject and coordinates the Department of Archeology of the Paranaense Museum, in Curitiba, where many of the finds from the archaeological excavations of the trail are housed.

Theories differ not only about the time of its creation, but also the exact location where the route passed. “We will always have several hypotheses”, explains Parellada. “It’s hard to be sure about the full path because it has changed over time.”

But the name and legend, at least, are still alive in the town of Peabiru, built in the 1940s, where the local government and groups of volunteers have recently created and marked out hiking trails inspired by the Caminho de Peabiru.

They are part of an ambitious tourism plan for Paraná launched in 2022, to map a likely stretch of the Path with up to 1,550 kilometers for cycling and walking, crossing the State from the coast and passing through 86 municipalities, to the border with Paraguay.

I traveled to Peabiru to discover at least one of these paths: a trail through the forest that includes seven waterfalls along the course of one of the region’s rivers. The riverbanks were almost certainly part of the Path, my guide Arléto Rocha informed me as we walked, passing over and under fallen trees and then knee-deep in the cold waters of the river, washing the rotten fruit from the soles of my boots.

Not content with having only his boots wet, Rocha dove into one of the waterfalls with his clothes on. Afterwards, he indicated places where he had found arrowheads, mortar, stone engravings and other archaeological gems in the last decade, which are now on display at the recently opened Municipal Museum “Caminhos de Peabiru”.

Most of the forest walk, like the rest of the way along the Paraná, is symbolic—the best possible estimate of where the original trail might have been, despite certainty in some parts, especially where there are historical maps and archaeological sites.

This region of southern Brazil has been the site of archaeological excavations since the 1970s, in search of remains of the Caminho de Peabiru. Likewise, there was also a dense indigenous population there (an estimated peak of around 2 million people, mostly Guaranis, in the 16th century).

Like many others I spoke with, Rocha is fascinated by the mystery of the trail and even wrote his master’s thesis on the subject. Historians, astronomers and archaeologists have also been grappling with this puzzle for decades, piecing together ancient maps, colonial records and oral histories to try to understand the path’s origins and purpose.

The consensus is that the main path of the network connected the east and west coasts of South America. From their starting points on the Brazilian coast (where the states of São Paulo, Paraná and Santa Catarina are located today), the trails met in Paraná, continuing through the territory that today forms Paraguay to the region of Potosí, in Bolivia, which it was rich in silver.

Upon reaching Lake Titicaca (today, the border between Bolivia and Peru), the path continued to Cusco —the capital of the Inca empire— and, from there, descended to the Peruvian coast and northern Chile.

“Roughly speaking, it can be said that Peabiru’s ‘long’ script was the one that followed the apparent movement of the Sun, east-west”, according to Bond, in the literary series “História do Caminho de Peabiru”, published in 2021.

In this series, the author analyzes several plausible hypotheses about the origins of the trail and concludes that the network of paths was probably created and used by several indigenous groups over the centuries, but its main characteristic was the desire to connect the Atlantic to the Pacific.

“That is, it doesn’t matter how many and which people built the stretches, because the relevant thing would be that the road, at a certain moment, came to be seen as a homogeneous and specific path, which represented on earth the ‘walk’ of the Sun in the sky” , according to her.

Among the people Bond refers to are the Guarani, one of the largest remaining native populations in South America. They live in parts of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia.

The Path of Peabiru is a physical and spiritual route in the Guarani culture, which leads to a mythological paradise called by them Yvy MarãEy, which is beyond the water (the Atlantic Ocean), where the sun rises.

This paradise (“the land without evil”, in free translation) is mentioned in the oral tradition of the Guarani, in their rituals, music, dance, symbology and in the names of places. Guarani legends even say that the network of paths is a reflection of the Milky Way on Earth.

It is also believed that the name of the trail comes from the Guarani word peabeyú, which means “path of trampled grass”, among other translations.

But for European colonists (such as the Portuguese navigator Aleixo Garcia), the Guarani spiritual path to paradise became a fast track to the riches of the Incas in expeditions through the New World, which ended up causing the mass death of populations. indigenous peoples of South America by war, hunger and, mainly, by disease.

Legends about Eldorado and Serra da Prata brought fleets of Spanish and Portuguese ships across the Atlantic and some indigenous groups helped them to penetrate the interior of the continent, through the Path of Peabiru, according to Parellada.

“Knowing the main routes and trails through the native populations became a strategic advantage, which amplified the looting, destruction and greed for new territories and mineral wealth”, she explains.

Over the following centuries, successive waves of explorers, Jesuit catechists, pioneers, merchants and colonizers also made use of the Peabiru Path to gain access to the interior of the continent — paving, expanding and, sometimes, changing the course of the path.

“The first written records about the trail date back to the 16th and 17th centuries”, according to Parellada. “They include Ruy Díaz de Guzmán’s account in 1612 of Garcia’s death at the hands of the Payaguás ethnic group during his return from Peru to the coast [brasileiro].”

To continue my research on the traces of the trail, I traveled to the coast of Santa Catarina, to Enseada do Brito, in the municipality of Palhoça —a quiet bay where historians believe Garcia would have lived and from there left on his mission to the Inca empire. . This is the starting point of another hike inspired by the Caminho de Peabiru —a 25-kilometer route that passes through beaches, sand dunes in the Serra do Tabuleiro State Park and a visit to two Guarani villages.

As I warm up for the walk, I try to imagine Garcia and his group of bearded castaways, thousands of kilometers from home, and their new accommodations with the Guarani after losing their ship.

As in the previous walk, the trail is only an estimate of the place where the Caminho de Peabiru may have passed. It was defined with the research of local entrepreneur Flávio Santos, who developed this tourism project after studying the history of the trail and the local archaeological sites.

Like many others, he sees the potential to attract year-round tourists, benefiting the local community, including nearby Guarani villages, if done right.

“We have this ancient trail, so why not connect history and local indigenous peoples?” asks Santos. “It’s important for locals to know this history and how indigenous peoples lived and how they were decimated.”

Parellada agrees: “A walk along the Caminho de Peabiru, combined with educational activities, could be a bridge to a complete understanding of the colonial past of South America, its biodiversity and the knowledge of indigenous peoples”.

read the original version of this report (in English) on the website BBC Travel.

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