Northeast Region of Rio Grande do Sul (Antônio Prado, Caxias do Sul, Cambará do Sul)

Picture taken by A/Z in Cambará do Sul (Canyon Fortaleza), available with other pictures and drawings at Fine Art America. 

"Die Natur soll der sichtbare Geist, der Geist die unsichtbare Natur sein."
Schelling
"... then a sigh from anxiety's abyss, a sigh so deep that it became frightened and doubted for a moment whether it dare take up residence in this place..."
Constantine Constantius (translation by M. G. Piety)

"Does not a mountain unintentionally evoke in us a sense of wonder? What is more angry than the flash of lightning and the sound of thunder?"

John Cage (Experimental Music)

"Prepara-te! Vamos juntas! O que eu tenho a fazer aqui? Não é tudo indiferente? Também vou me registrar em Uri e viver no desfiladeiro."

Varvara Pietrovna (from Dostoevky's Demons, as translated into Portuguese by Paulo Bezerra)

"Subir o monte... O vento fazendo esvoaçar as roupas, os cabelos. Os braços livres, o coração fechando e abrindo selvagemente, mas o rosto claro e sereno sob o sol. E sabendo principalmente que a terra embaixo dos pés era tão profunda e tão secreta que não havia a temer a invasão do entendimento dissolvendo o seu mistério. Tinha uma qualidade de glória esta sensação."
Clarice Lispector
"Chaque être humain a une montagne. Pour les Iks c'était Morungole, pour Cézanne la montagne Sainte-Victoire, le mont Sinaï pour les Israéliens. Moi aussi je suis content d'avoir eu une montagne, c'est fondamental dans une vie, c'est quelque chose qui donne un certain sens, le sens que vous devez être là."
Evguen Bavcar (interviewed by Hervé Guibert)
"Cette race vit nue, l'hiver, dans ses montagnes obstruées de neige, au mépris de toutes théories médicales... Si incroyable que cela paraisse, les Indiens Tarahumaras vivent comme s'ils étaient déjà morts... Ils ne voient pas la réalité et tirent des forces magiques du mépris qu'ils ont pour la civilisation."
A. Artaud (La race des hommes perdus)
"Die beste Küche ist die Piemont's."
Nietzsche

"Today I came down from Hochschober. Up there, in the heights, there one should stay..."

Webern to Schoenberg (quoted by Malcolm Hayes)

"[The Hochschwab] was glorious, because this is not sport for me, not amusement, but something quite different: it is a search for the highest, a discovery of correspondences in nature for everything that serves me as a model, a model for all that I would like to have within myself... These high ravines with their mountain pines and mysterious plants. The latter, above all, touch me deeply. But not because they are so 'beautiful'. It is not the beautiful landscape, the beautiful flowers in the usual romantic sense, that move me. My objective is the deep, unfathomable, inexhaustible meaning in everything, especially in these manifestations of nature. All nature is dear to me, but that which express itself 'up there' is the dearest of all... I always carry my botanical lexicon with me... This physical reality contains all the miracles..."

Webern to Alban Berg (quoted by Malcolm Hayes)

"Dans la tradition taoïste, la montagne est le séjour des Immortels, êtres insaisissables qui se fondent dans le relief et donnent une dimension sensible au sacré; la fréquentation de la montagne, notamment par les lettrés, relève d'une quête de l'immortalité dont la cueillette des imples assurant la longévité constitue l'aspect le plus prosaïque."
"Le taoïsme enseigne qu'un souffle cosmique, le qi, irradie dans toute la Chine à partir de la chaîne montagneuse du Kunlun, circulant le long de lignes de force comparables aux veines qui irriguent le corps humain."
Philippe Descola

"El modelo del alma —el tipo, subraya sor Juana— es Faetón, el joven que Júpiter fulmina pero que  eterniza su nombre al despeñarse. Ya  antes había comparado la aspiración del alma hacia la Causa Primera a las pirámides egipcias. El modelo simbólico del ansia espiritual es la pirámide..."

Octavio  Paz (Las trampas de la fe)

"Until the beginning of the Heian period, when Saicho and Kukai opened their monastic centers, no major Buddhist institution existed on a  mountain."

"Mt. Koya, located at several days' walking distance from the capital, was regarded as a locus of divine power. It was Esoteric Buddhism as a mountain religion that established an intimate relationship with Shinto."

"In ancient Japan the mountains, where kami resided, were believed to be more sacred than the plains. In the Nara period many quasi-Buddhist ascetics, followers of an unsystematized Esoteric Buddhism (zomitsu), disciplined themselves in the sacred mountains with the aim of obtaining occult power... These mountain ascetics made no differentiation between the Buddhist guardians and the Shinto kami as objects of prayer. Thus there arose, through practical necessity rather than through any theoretical speculation, a real fusion between Esoteric Bucchism and Shinto. This developed into Shugendo, an indigenous, ascetic mountain religion which greatly affected popular spiritual life up to the early Meiji period."

Yoshito S. Hakeda (Kukai: Major Works/Columbia Univ. Press)

"I, Kukai, have heard that where the mountains are high the clouds let fall much rain, thus nourishing vegetation, and that where drops of water accumulate fishes and dragons breed and multiply. Thus it was that the Buddha preached on steep Mount Gridhakuta [in North India] and that Avalokitesvara manifested himself on Mount Potalaka [in South India], whose strange peaks and precipices face the shores. Indeed, these mountains had evoked their presence."

Kukai (memorial relating to the founding of mount Koya, 816/Yoshit Hakeda's traslation)

“The Old Italian Colonial Zone lies entirely within the dissected scarp face that bounds the diabase cap of the Paraná Plateau north of the Rio Jacuí. Here, southflowing tributaris of the Jacuí have carved deep, youthful valleys into the plateau margin, leaving the lobelike outline of the upland areas and a scattering of outlier hills projecting southward” (Stuart Clark Rothwell, The Old Italian Colonial Zone of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, p. 18).

“This is the zone of hot summers and cold winters, with frequent frosts. At highest elevations, winter snow is not unusual. In the forested areas, the tierra fria is the climatic environment of the Araucaria Pine, Araucaria augustifolia...” (Rothwell, p. 20-21).

“Fogs are common occurrence. They appear in all the valleys and in the uplands between the hills. They tend to be most common in the valley of the Rio das Antas and in its tributaries, where, in the fall, they were observed as late in the day as 10 AM, when the entire uplands were bathed in bright sunshine” (Rothwell, p. 28).

See also:

- Caxias do Sul and Galopolis;

- Antônio Prado;

- Land of the Southern Lapwing; 

- Environmental issue in Brazil (new harbour); 

- Torres (Northeast of Rio Grande do Sul); 

- Benvenuti a Rotzo;