Santa Cruz das Palmeiras

Santa Cruz das Palmeiras is my wife's home town. It's home to about 30,000 residents, and it's in the middle of miles upon miles of sugar cane fields. The town now has two stop lights! Santa Cruz das Palmeiras is in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Here's a google map so you can play with the location relative to other points you may know within Brazil. I assure you, it's close to none of them.

Describing it's location

When Jenifer has described the location of her hometown to Brazilians, there are two places that come up that are within about 20-30 minutes. The first is the no. 51 distillery, which is the largest producer of cachaça in Brazil. We drove by it on the highway, and it looks like it could be an oil refinery with the size of the tanks around the compound. It doesn't look like the cleanest establishment, I'll tell you that much.

The other frame of reference for people is that it's near the Brazilian Air Force Academy.

The Town

The town is known as the home of the "red feet," due to the high levels of iron oxide in the red soil. You can find similar soils in the Carolinas and northern Georgia as well. I hope to have more of the history of the "red feet" name in a later post.

The town is very compact. One thing about Brazilians, is they build on top of each other. The entire town looks like a bunch of town homes, since the houses oftentimes walls with their neighbors. There really isn't any open space within the town itself.

The roads are primarily brick throughout the town, and they are heavily crowned since this place does get quite a bit of rain. There are almost no gutters in the street to collect rain water, they use the magic of gravity to drain the water out of town. Additionally, since the roads are made of brick, much of the rain is absorbed directly into the ground without much run-off.

Even though everything is pretty closed in, and everything is build on top of each other, you can sometimes get a good view of the surrounding terrain from people's homes. The shot below is from one of Jenifer's grandparent's homes, where you can see the rolling hills and sugar cane fields that surround the town.

Most people who live in a second story home, are usually living on top of a shop.

How people get by

People who move into the town who cannot find the job will open up a small shop if they have any extra money. The lower level of all buildings downtown has shops of just about every kind. Shop sizes vary from the size of a bedroom, to what you'd expect if you walked into a shop in a typical American strip center.

Jenifer's father runs a butcher shop in town. Most of what he sells is of the pork and beef variety. The meat counter here as well as in the local store both do what he's doing here and display the meat hung from hooks.

In the next picture, you see Jenifer's dad behind the counter chatting with Jenifer, and her brother Jair. The trophies to the left of the picture are from fishing. The two picture frames are pictures of Zoey that we've sent over the past year. He has them both facing behind the counter and says they are "just for him."

Since he is in the food industry, he also has access great cheeses, fish, and pretty much anything else you could want. On Sunday, he decided we needed a fresh cheese, so he left the house, headed to the shop and brought this fresh natural cheese home:

The cheese was only a few days old, and was very creamy.

The Family

The family is sprinkled all over the town. We've visited some of Jenifer's grandparents, aunts, uncles, and several family friends. We see a few new people every day. Here are a few pictures with Zoey's great grandparents from this past weekend:

Jenifer has scheduled a photo shoot to get a four generation shot with everyone sometime next week. That's going to be an awesome thing for Zoey to see when she's older. Due to deaths, at no point in my life could I have participated in a full three generation photo, so being able to go four generations deep, and have everyone there is amazing.