Gruta de Maquiné | |
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Cave painting found in one of the chambers inside of Gruta de Maquiné
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Location | Minas Gerais, Brazil |
Depth | 18 |
Length | 650 |
Discovery | 1825 |
Geology | Limestone |
Access | MG 231 |
Website | Gruta de Maquiné |
Gruta de Maquiné (MG-0243) (English: Maquiné Grotto), also Lapa Nova de Maquiné, is the oldest and one of the most commercially visited caves in Brazil. It is located about 5 km from Cordisburgo and 143 km northwest of Belo Horizonte, in the State of Minas Gerais. The cave has seven huge chambers explored, amounting to 650 linear meters and unevenness of the ground of only 18 meters. Safety measures like lighting, walkways and handrails allow a multitude of visitors to enjoy safely the wonders of the grotto where the whole journey is accompanied by an experienced local guide.
Maquiné finds itself facing north, with a portico shaped in the form of a shallow arch with width of approximately 18 metres and height of only 8 metres. The main direction of the cave is from north to south, being its greatest extent of 438.91 metres. With an internal temperature ranging between 26 °C and 27 °C, it is essentially horizontal, forming a continuous gallery with an average width of 9 to 12 meters and height of 15 to 18 meters. The main element of its formation is calcium carbonate, presenting also other minerals such as silica, gypsum, quartz and iron. Its galleries and halls, true architectural oddities, are the result of the formidable job of water in the persistence of millennia.
The grotto features beautiful morphology due to its wide halls and aesthetic value due to their speleothematic beauty, in addition to its great scientific value as it must have accommodated a considerable volume of water in the past.
Considered as the "cradle" of paleontology in the country, the grotto was discovered in 1825 by farmer Joaquim Maria Maquiné, then the landowner. It is world-famous for paleontological importance detected initially by Peter Claussen and the Danish naturalist Peter Wilhelm Lund who scientifically first explored it in 1834, showing the world its natural beauty. Dr. Lund remained inside the cave nearly two years doing his research on the Brazilian paleontology, describing all the chambers, explaining the formation of stalagmites and stalactites and examining human remains and petrifaction of animals from the Quaternary period. Among others, he found fossilized skeletons of birds with an extraordinary curvature of up to three meters and the Nothrotherium maquinense, the smallest and most emblematic of the terrestrial sloths which he found in 1835 when he first explored the cave.