São Gotardo — São Gotardo Map Poster & Print

The map

São Gotardo Map Poster & Print

São Gotardo lies on the high plateau of the Alto Paranaíba in western Minas Gerais, at an altitude where the air is cooler than much of the surrounding state. The town itself is a tidy grid of streets on gently sloping ground, but its most distinctive map feature lies outside the urban edge: large, geometric farm plots and, in many places, the round footprints of centre-pivot irrigation.

The municipality is known across Brazil for vegetable farming, carrots in particular, and much of that agriculture was developed by farming families of Japanese descent who settled on the plateau in the later twentieth century. That history shows up in the land: orderly fields, straight access roads and a highly organised rural landscape. A São Gotardo map poster captures the town grid and hints at that engineered countryside around it.

Within the urban area, the streets form a mostly regular pattern of rectangular blocks, with a few longer avenues carrying traffic out toward the highways and farms. Small streams mark the lower ground, and their valleys interrupt the grid in places. Seen as a single drawing, the town feels practical and composed, a working centre for a very productive plateau.